Does The Perfect Floor Plan Exist? Here’s How Our Architect Laid Out My Brother’s Family Of Four Home

Ooh, I love a floor plan post – a statement I certainly wouldn’t have said as a stylist 14 years ago. But once you “learn” to read them, the world opens up and I can geek out on them for HOURS (which is dangerous). For the blog, we simplify them and make them more visually interesting for those still getting their “floor plan legs”, but for all you design nerds and enthusiasts out there, today is dedicated to you. This is my brother’s new construction house that is being built along the river in Portland. Annie Usher is the architect, JP Macy of Sierra Custom Construction is the general contractor, and Max Humphrey and I have co-interior designed a lot of it.

Layout Needs And Wants

1. Four bedrooms – a primary suite, 2 rooms for kids, and 1 guest room. Katie (my brother’s wife) and I both love having all the bedrooms on the same floor, but on different ends for privacy (we have this at Mountain House and it’s THE BEST). Close enough to hear them, but far enough away so they can’t hear you. 🙂
2. Four and 1/2 bathrooms – as I’m writing this it sounds like a lot, but it makes sense. 1) First floor powder room for most guests (this is the 1/2 bath), 2) Mudroom bath for post-river showers (and a secondary guest bath for crashers in the family room), 3) Primary bath, 4) Shared kids and 5) Small guest bath. If you build it they will come (and er, go the bathroom??).
3. It was important to maximize the views of the river and yet, their property doesn’t “face” the river – it’s a sliver of land that runs perpendicular to it, not alongside it. Annie did a fantastic job of executing so many views despite this challenge.
4. They wanted an open floor plan for living/dining and kitchen but extremely casual (for a lot of sports-watching and having people over) and also a closed-off family/play room for obviously “shoving kids and mess away”. Y’all, it’s a party house, I’m just going to say it.
5. Ken is a big dude and likes to exist in indestructible spaces, so the height of the ceilings and the width of the hallways are generous.
6. They wanted a great indoor/outdoor flow between living/kitchen and patios/river. While it rains a lot here, the summers are GLORIOUS at 75 degrees and green, so we live both in and out a lot from June – October.
7. So much natural light – wonder where they got that from 🙂 Annie did a great job of making sure that the light they get comes from the right direction (aka not harsh western light in their bedroom, etc.).

The Biggest Challenge

The two biggest challenges were the shape of the lot and the fact that the lot sits in a floodplain. Their property, the lot itself, is actually really long and skinny, ending with the river, so while Annie wanted to maximize the view, not every room was going to be able to see it. The floodplain meant that the ground floor of living had to be at least 7’ higher than the driveway as you enter the site. Katie and Ken’s biggest fear was that because of the floodplain, their house was going to look behemoth and like a large box sitting on a hill.  So Annie’s first task was to tackle both of these issues with amassing volume that helped bring the scale of the house down as you entered the site and maximize the views from the critical rooms. (Note that you are allowed to have a garage/storage area in a floodplain, just not a finished/living area – so we were lucky to be able to stack the garage below the ground floor). So with that, Annie was able to break up the house into two sections – a two-story section where all the bedrooms are on the 2nd floor and a 1 story section to the south that allowed the living room to be vaulted.

This is the view from the river – the living room is on the left, open to the dining room and kitchen on the right, with the primary bedroom on top of it and the rest of the bedrooms behind it. All of the first floor opens to the backyard which leads to the river. Annie made sure that all of the rooms had a pretty view because both the front and back are lovely in different ways (with the sides being neighbors). Even the guest room (sandwiched in the middle) has a window that juts out to see the river.

So How Do you Lay Out Your Main Floor If It’s New Construction? Ideas From The Architect Herself

1. For me, one of the big items in a house is the different kinds of circulation. And the circulation to the kitchen always seems to need to be as efficient as possible, as you are taking that route more than any other, and it is usually more purposeful.
2. I like to avoid going through other rooms to get to the kitchen, and I love the hallway to the kitchen. This frees up the furniture layout in the living room and dining room, and gives you a quick route to the kitchen, which we all want. 
3. Powder bathrooms need privacy. I try to make it so that the door of the powder bath can not be seen from any of the major rooms like the living room, dining room, or kitchen. Nothing like walking out to the bathroom and the entire dinner party is staring at you. Or when you have guests over and your kid goes to the bathroom without shutting the door.
4. For washer and dryer, yes usually up by the bedrooms, but know yourself and your environment. For muddy or sandy zones, you might want to think about having W/D in the mudroom location to make sure you are not tracking sand/mud through the house. Or in these locations, try not to have carpet between the backdoor and the laundry room so the floor is easier to clean. This comes from someone who lives in a very very very muddy family 🙂
5. And lastly, there are those messy spots in your house that you try very hard to clean, but they never stay clean, and it stresses you out (drop zone, much?). Figure out what those are, and look at clever ways to keep them functional, but just out of view, so you can leave your house or go to bed without seeing them. 

We obviously made many iterations of these plans, so with already 6 cooks in the kitchen (2 designers, 1 architect, one experienced GC, and 2 opinionated homeowners) I decided a couple of years ago not to open this process to the masses. While I have always loved and appreciated so many reader suggestions to our floor plan (I still want to kiss those of you who said to get rid of our second set of stairs at the mountain house), as you can imagine it also creates more doubt, options, and stress. So this is final:)

All of us have ideas from our own experiences and perspectives based on our size of our family, lifestyle, etc. I almost feel like I’m a liability to the project because I know them so well that anytime Annie or Max would try to encourage them to do the better, more designer-y move that I knew wouldn’t work for them as well, I couldn’t help but back them up. I just really really didn’t want them to regret how the house functioned for THEM. And listen, yes, they have a fancy house but they aren’t fancy people – they are homebodies who like to have people over to watch games and kids to play. While this is a show house, too, it really really needs to be for them. I generally fall right between a designer and a mom – where I want this to look GREAT, but I also know that a family that watches sports all the time needs to have a TV visible from the kitchen (and BBQ LOL). HERE WE GO:

First Floor Final Plan

Things to know – they will MOSTLY come up through the stairs (in the middle) from the basement/garage which is why the mudroom and drop zone (across from the pantry) are there. And like Annie said, both are hidden from view.

A huge debate on the first floor was whether the kitchen or the dining room should face the river (just swap the island with the dining table and pretend there are countertops/sink under the windows). Ultimately, you can see the beautiful views from everywhere in that room and Katie/Ken thought it was more important to enjoy the best view while sitting around the table, rather than while cooking or doing the dishes (they are big grillers but not huge cooks).

The Second Floor Floor Plan

As you can see, their room is on the opposite end of the kids’ rooms but is still close enough to feel close. I love this layout so much. Annie did such a nice job with the sightlines not being interrupted – meaning the doorways line up perfectly and nothing stops your eye. This is obviously a more contemporary move (I’m sure that Annie would have a more scientific explanation) but it’s the architect’s job to maximize views, light, work with the elements (wind, sun), and think about not only how you flow through a space but what you see from where (and often clean sightlines are the preference in modern homes).

What Have I Learned So Far?

Well, namely that I much prefer to spend someone else’s money and make decisions for other people’s homes:) But aside from that, while new construction is daunting on the front end (and financially still feels a lot scarier to me), it is less stressful for the homeowner and designer because the bulk of the vision and work comes from the architect (and engineer, GC). I weighed in like a sibling/friend on this but I knew that whatever they landed on we could make the hard finishes and the furnishings look beautiful. So now I will absolutely do a new build in my future.

I’ve learned a lot from Annie and Max from their wealth of experiences which are obviously different than mine. We disagreed about some things which I find so exciting, showing that in the creative process of building a house, there are only a few true rights and wrongs (we also fundamentally and stylistically agreed on most things, thank god).

Because this is my brother’s home (and the floorplan is a done deal) you are welcome to comment but remember that they are monitored before being published, so no need to write any thoughts that might make anyone here feel badly. They are taking the risk of being exposed on the blog (and I can’t imagine they’ve grown the thick skin I have after 14 years), so yah, imma protect my little big brother 🙂

*Opening Image by Kaitlin Green