Open plan living spaces may be a hallmark of contemporary architecture, but they fail to meet the demands of modern day life, argues Brisbane architect Stuart Vokes. Janne Ryan tours a family home Vokes recently designed, which uses rooms to create distinct places for congregation and solitude.

After spending decades opening up spaces in homes, Brisbane architect Stuart Vokes wants to 'bring back the room’.

There are places to hide, there are places to be exposed, there are spaces for the family to sit down and interact, and there are places for them to be quiet. Catherine O’Donovan, home owner

‘Many of our clients are coming to us with stories of how their open plan house is failing them,’ he says.

According to Vokes, the spaces are failing because they are unable to provide places to ‘pause’ or ‘find silence’, the very things we are wanting—perhaps needing—today.

‘Houses in the city are proving to be a place where you can find solitude. Rooms are really symbolic of that.’

He describes open plan designs as ‘a necessary detour in the floor planning of a family house’, a move that responded to societal shifts in how we perceived and performed domestic duties.

‘Doing the laundry and preparing the food were brought into the social spaces of the family home, that’s a really important social change in the family unit,’ says Vokes.

‘It represents a shift in the way we now understand those responsibilities to be a collective agenda, not just the agenda of just one person in the household.’

In open plan houses, it is common to find the kitchen positioned prominently within a greater living room. Often, the laundry was reduced to a washing machine and dryer, perhaps obscured beneath a bench in a semi-open space, removing the need for an independent laundry room.

‘There are certain events that are beautifully accommodated in open plan, but not all events in the family house are suited to being in one big single room,’ Vokes says.

Catherine O’Donovan and Simon Wood employed Vokes to restore their derelict Queenslander, located in Brisbane’s inner city. The house had been divided into two apartments and was, according to Catherine, ‘in really bad nick'.

The larger challenge was to bring back the original aesthetic of the Queenslander and reconsider the role of its original rooms. However, it was only after the couple discovered the original verandah floorboards beneath some lino that architectural plans for the house started to take shape.

‘When we pulled the lino up there was a green paint on [the old floor boards], and we liked that,’ O'Donovan recalls.

It was then that the O'Donovan and Wood began considering building the kitchen on what was originally the verandah, which at first blush seemed an unlikely choice.

‘When we looked at putting the kitchen anywhere else, it would’ve had a huge footprint, and I was quite keen to have a long simple kitchen with not too much structure in it,’ O'Donovan explains.

‘That helped drive that decision to put the kitchen on the verandah. I love the feeling of being in here and having the windows open, the sun and the breeze through the place. It’s a beautiful space this one.’

In this family home, Vokes challenges the idea that the kitchen should be a ‘trophy in the house’. Instead, by placing the kitchen in the space originally occupied by the verandah, Vokes is reminding us that the kitchen is a place where everyone congregates and should therefore be located on the best part of the site.

With that in mind, O'Donovan and Wood built their kitchen at ground level in order to be close to their children. The extension they have built, which is not visible from the street, is where they have placed the kids' new bedrooms, overlooking the back garden.

One exception to their ground floor building is a small library, a private retreat, which was built on a second level.

‘There are places to hide, there are places to be exposed, there are spaces for the family to sit down and interact, and there are places for them to be quiet,’ O’Donovan says.

‘Families change so much. With babies you need to be close, and as they get older you want to get a bit of space between you, so that they can be a more independent.’

Vokes suggests the way forward is to think about ‘room planning, as opposed to open planning'.

He speculates that children learn from experiencing ‘a hierarchy of rooms [and] a group of rooms of varied scale', something that's impossible in open plan spaces.

‘Behavioural lessons [learnt in rooms] can be scaled up to the scale of the city,' he says. 'There is the way that you behave at a football stadium, which is different to how you behave in a public library.’

‘Maybe these lessons are learnt in the family home.’

By Design looks at the places and things we imagine, build, use and occupy, explaining how creative ideas take tangible form through the design process.



