The Growing Popularity of Open Plan Living
In recent years, it’s become much more popular to spend time and money on renovating your home to make it the best that it can be. The rising popularity of home improvement and property selling TV shows has had a major influence on this trend. Light, spacious areas within the home are now the standard to aspire to and the old model of a separate dining room is rapidly being overtaken in popularity by the kitchen diner. If you are thinking about designing an open plan living space there are a number of considerations worth exploring, such as bespoke fire safety solutions from Bristol Automist installers or others nationwide.
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According to the Telegraph, since 2002 around 20% of home owners have had a downstairs wall knocked down in order to pursue the ideal of open plan living.
Practical Considerations
While demolishing walls in order to create a light, airy home seems like a great idea, it’s very important to consider any other issues which may result from this. A major factor will of course be privacy, which will depend on how the lifestyle of your household is structured. What might be an ideal situation for a family will not necessarily work well for flat sharers.
Factors such as noise can also be very important. Will some members of the household be disturbed when others are taking part in noisy activities such as watching TV? Will cooking smells be a problem if the downstairs area is open plan?
Other Considerations
Fire safety is also a major consideration for those thinking of embracing open plan living. According to BBC, approximately 60% of house fires begin in the kitchen area. If your accommodation is open plan, there are additional factors that you need to take into account when assessing if your environment is safe. Sometimes the layout of an open plan flat or house can create hazardous “inner rooms”, where there is no other escape route besides the open area itself in the event of a fire.
Aside from using traditional technologies to combat these fires, more people are opting to purchase specialised Automist systems, installed by Mainpoint or other accredited firms across the country.
If high enough temperatures are detected, indicative of fire conditions, a fine mist of water is released in order to combat the flames.
