Simply put, a house’s living and recreation rooms should contain enough space to satisfy the needs of its occupants. It means enough space for general and specific leisure activities such as entertaining friends, watching television, listening to music, practicing musical instruments, gaming, reading, studying, writing, bookkeeping, children’s play, and plain old relaxing . . . all in comfort, and, if need be, privacy.

Living and recreation rooms must also be adequate in size to hold sufficient furniture for comfortable seating. At the same time they should be large enough to permit the rearrangement of major pieces of furniture into a variety of positions while still maintaining good traffic circulation within the room.

Depending on a dwelling’s size and floor plan, living and recreational space may be planned as a number of individual rooms, or may be distilled into a single, all-purpose area.

The Living Room

If one all-purpose room is all you desire, or all you can afford at the outset, that room should probably be the living room. At one time referred to as a parlor, the living room was originally designed to entertain guests in a formal fashion. The living room should be at a quiet place for reading and conversation. It should be close to the front door, next to dining space, and away from sleeping areas. There should also be a closet outside the living room, near the front door, for coats, hats, boots and other items. There are two main types of living rooms: traditional and open.

A traditional living room is a room placed away from the kitchen and other work or recreational rooms in the house. This out-of-the-way placement allows at least two separate entertainment centers (including the kitchen in a smaller house) so that more than one family member can plan activities with outside friends at the same time, without infringing on each other’s privacy. The traditional living room is usually situated at a dead-end location to minimize unwanted interruptions and through traffic. Doors can be considered for additional privacy.

As mentioned earlier, if the house you plan will not accommodate other recreation rooms beyond a living room, then consider that your living room will have to be used for whatever leisure-time activities you enjoy. When a single room must serve a variety of functions, a more open type of room is often the most practical choice. In fact, due to the overall reduction of square footage in recent years for cost reasons, open planning is becoming increasingly important because it lends the impression of maximum space for the money. In fact, it does give you more square footage of usable space, because there are less walls to take up space. Open planning serves well in the more contemporary and expensive plans, and in households having few or no children, where privacy is not as important as it would be to a large family. However, a danger in open-type rooms is that spaces must be carefully planned so they don’t appear jumbled and haphazardly thrown together.