Zen And The Art of Floor Plan Design

Author | Paul Skuse, Oakfield Design & Creation

Interior design for property development has seen a recent move from the popular “Soft-Scandi” approach and is now referencing terms such as Japandi (a combination of Scandinavian functionality with Japanese rustic minimalism) with following the lines of minimalist, uncluttered, design – maximising space and light.

This evolution of interior spaces is proving to be very appealing and successful, but are your floor plans following this same clean and orderly design style?

We recently “inherited” some previously designed floor plans as we were commissioned to take over the branding, design and marketing for a contemporary residential scheme and were amazed at the level of information that was loaded into the existing marketing floor plans that we were supplied.

The herringbone timber flooring to the ground floor and carpets to the upper levels were shown in full graphic illustration, confusing the potential buyer’s eye and detracting from what our plans are really wanting to portray – space and light.

Often, in the marketplace, we see plans that are a level better than this “load everything into the plans including the kitchen sink (although we advocate adding the sink and hob positions to our plans as an important addition!)” but are still too cramped and infilled with heavy colours or dark tints.

When it comes to creating marketing plans for houses (and apartments) that work at an optimal level that are informative and easy to understand, I’m from the Zen-like school of thinking.

Clean, crisp and simple. White space, minimal furniture clearly giving a sense of perspective of each room’s size. Light grey or light colour tints for the exterior and stud walls. A super-light tint surrounding the plans to accentuate the white space of the floor plans themselves.

Dims should be listed alongside, not placed inside the plans themselves. We also like to add small arrows to our plans to show the exact position the dimensions are measured from, especially with rooms that have a dog-leg design layout.

And finally, although of primary importance, size matters. Too often we see a three-storey, five bed home with its floor plans all squeezed onto a single page. We’re selling square footage here so look to keep one or a max of two plans side by side on a full page, allowing our buyers to really study the architectural and interior design and understand the flow of the rooms and entire home.

By showing less we can actually show more and give our viewers a much better understanding and representation of the homes we’re marketing to them.

Apartment full-floor and individual plans follow this same set of principals but also have their own additional idiosyncrasies which I’ll discuss in a later article.