Given 2000 square feet for a home design, how would you allocate it between rooms? More small rooms, or fewer big rooms? Let's say that the 2000 square feet is after any hallways are accounted for. How many bedrooms and bathrooms would you put in, and how big? What about the kitchen and family rooms?
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Personally, I would opt for smaller bedrooms and larger common areas with the intended effect of getting the family to spend more time together. ;-) With 2000' sq, you could have 3-4 bedrooms as well as a couple of family rooms. I love the idea of a formal living room, but unless you use it frequently, that space could be better used as a den/family/rec room. I'm not a math gal, so I won't give you specific measurement suggestions.
I agree with Heather.
I think that many small rooms make a house seem bigger than if it had few big rooms, other things (like actual size) being equal. A friend of mine has an odd apartment with four bedrooms and two TV rooms (and a few bathrooms, and a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen), all of them as small as they could reasonably be. Wandering around it from room to room and seeing all the different environments, you'd think the apartment was huge, but it wasn't.
However, I think it's important for at least one common area - the living room or the dining room - to be roomy and not at all claustrophobic. So one big common room (like a living room + dining room) and many small bedrooms / family rooms sounds like the perfect way to manage space.
If it were just me, I'd look at utility before design. What do I want each room to do. If I was part of a couple, and the other part was my wife, the answer is easy. Whatever she wants.
I would tend to try to meld what Randy and Heather say. Fairly small bedrooms to encourage people to stay out of them, but that would let you have extra common rooms. That way you could divide up the public space in such a way that if someone wants to go off and do something, they have another room to go to.
Well, the rules seem to say that for a given square footage and location more bedrooms equates to higher resale value. Recent popular home design books (Susanka's "Not So Big House" series) include an "away room" in the common space, so that some members of the household can be doing noisy activities such as television watching without disturbing conversation etc.
I have seen some clever hallway/door/alcove arangements that allowed a bedroom/dressing room/bathroom suite to become two bedrooms and a family bathroom just by moving a door a few feet further down a hall. I think if fewer larger bedrooms were what I wanted, but the neighborhood could support more bedrooms, I might build some extra doors into hallways and position windows in such a way that a simple partition wall could make new smaller bedrooms easily. As a small child I loved visiting houses with multiple ways into a room...
Here are some things to keep in mind:
More rooms means more walls, and walls take up space. It also means more internal corners, which are less easily used. You will also have to increase the number of outlets, lights, and switches in the overall structure. Buildings cut into many small rooms are not as efficiently used or constructed as those with larger spaces.
Whereas you can flow easily from one large room to another, smaller rooms tend to require more corridors to reach them, again reducing efficiency.
It is more difficult to balance and properly size the HVAC system when many rooms can be isolated from the common return by doors. You could opt for a fully ducted return, but that's mighty expensive.
If you insist on small rooms anyway, try to clear span the floor and ceiling structure across them to the exterior walls, so you can move or remove the interior walls in the future. Also, try to route vertical plumbing away from these partitions. Load-bearing walls and those with plumbing runs inside are difficult to modify in any meaningful way.
Instead of designing the house yourself, you could debate how you want to use it instead, and let an architect figure out what that means in terms of room size and quantity, an approach some of you are leaning toward. That's 2 cents from this architect, anyway.
Definitely think about what spaces you need to do what you want, but in general I'd say many smallish rooms and one large room to practice flying your model helicoptor in.