Open-Plan Turned Four Rooms Into One – and I Say We've Lost Something Important
We’ve been reading European homes wrong – it's not the original materials or the vintage rug, it's the threshold that matters – even if the door stays open
The parquet floors in most older European apartments are original. They were there before the current tenant, and the one before that, and the one before that. Nobody installed them as a design choice. They are simply what the floor is, and the whole room responds to them: the rugs, the furniture placement, the atmosphere. The room arrived with its character already intact, and the job of everyone who has lived in it since is to respond to that, not override it.
This is the thing I keep coming back to in every home renovation and flip I take on. My instinct, before anything else, is to find what's already there and worth keeping. The original floor, the original molding, the original proportions. The bones of a room that someone built with intention, often a century ago, are almost always better than what we'd put in their place. Preserving them isn't nostalgia. It's good design sense. The room already knows what it is. The work is learning to listen to it.
That logic runs through everything I find myself admiring in European homes. The room sets the terms. The objects answer it. And the spatial decisions, the things that make those interiors feel the way they do, follow directly from that understanding.
The first consequence is doors.
Every room in a traditional European home has a door. You don't drift from the kitchen into the living room. You enter them. Each room you arrive at has to justify itself the moment you cross into it, and it closes behind you. The room is a complete thing.
The open-plan layout eliminated this. What it replaced it with is a single large space, asked to be a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and somewhere calm, all at once. Most of the time, it fails at all four. The rooms should be closed. Even partially. Even with a pocket door that's almost always open. The threshold matters.
The second consequence is the entrance.
Even in a 45 square meter Paris apartment, the foyer is a room. There's a table, a mirror, a specific place for what your pockets held when you came in. The French have an object for this: the vide-poche, literally 'empty pocket.' A dish where the keys go, where the coins go. The entrance is not a transition. It's the first room, and it's designed to function as one.
In the homes I've worked on that feel most like themselves, the entrance is the room I think about first. Not the kitchen, not the living room. It sets the register for everything that follows.
The third consequence is the kitchen.
This is the one that clients push back on most. The instinct right now is to open everything up, to knock through and make the kitchen part of the living room, to make it visible and social and central. I understand the appeal. I've also spent enough time in European homes to know what gets lost when you do it.
A traditional European kitchen in an apartment is a functional space, not a showpiece. Separate, not hidden. Its own room with its own door. The living space doesn't have to absorb the smell of dinner being made or the visual noise of a counter that hasn't been cleared. The salon gets to be the salon. Each room is asked to do one thing well rather than everything adequately.
When I separate the kitchen in a project, even partially, even with a wide opening rather than a full wall, something shifts in how the rest of the space sits. The living room stops apologising for the kitchen behind it. It becomes the room it was supposed to be.
This is the misread. We've been trying to copy the look while skipping the logic entirely.
The logic is this: the room sets the terms, and everything else responds. Each space deserves a threshold and a single purpose. The entrance tells the home what it is. The kitchen is allowed to be a kitchen. And the original floor, if it's still there, is almost certainly better than whatever you'd replace it with.
Most of the time, what's missing from a home isn't more. It's a door.
Interior designer Nina Takesh is one of Homes & Gardens' Editors-At-Large for By Design, sharing her thoughts on decor. See the rest of her articles here.
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