By Stacy Hunt
The next generation of homeowners wants a first floor master suite. Or do they? Perhaps the market says that open floor plans for first-time homebuyers are best. Many of them have toddlers, and a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the living room is a must.
At least for today.
Tomorrow the kids grow up, and mom and dad may want a more formal dining room area to entertain guests, cutting off that once open floor plan.
Maybe that first-floor master suite is only attractive to a portion of the market, or perhaps it's a trend.
With conflicting information and changing market needs, how do you create flexible home designs that will address today's homebuyers' needs, as well as tomorrow's?
The Department of Housing and Urban Development's Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH) Program has been exploring this question, addressing the need for flexible floor plans through their research and demonstration projects. In consumer research done by the PATH Program, consumers placed high value on the ability to reconfigure their floor plans with ease.
But walls are stationary objects, with complex mechanical systems entwined in their innards — aren't they? Not necessarily so. A promising solution to the desire for flexible floor plans is movable wall systems. Such systems have been around for generations in commercial applications. Many of us have worked in an office environment where they're used to add a conference area or to reconfigure the floor plan to add or expand offices without significant remodeling or the associated cost and disruption. Similar systems have been used to convert sports spaces, such as racquetball and squash courts. Another close cousin of the office systems are used to partition ballrooms and school spaces.
A move toward residential use
The same concept and technology — with a few twists — are now being explored for the residential market and are featured in the 2007 PATH Concept Home in Omaha, Neb. The system, provided by The New York Wall Company, consists of pressurized panel walls that are designed by the company and leased as a temporary partition. The walls were created to allow tenants to subdivide space within apartments to create privacy for roommates, space for baby's nursery, etc. PATH is using one such wall partition system on the first floor of the Concept Home to divide living and dining spaces.
Movable wall systems have much more potential than serving as simple dividers between living room and dining room. LifeSPACE Walls, for example, can incorporate everything from electrical cabling to plumbing and quick connections. Commercial applications feature chases for utilities, offsite prefabrication of panels and sound-transmission reduction, and they are available in a variety of finishes. If this technology can be refined for residential applications, the possibilities are endless. New-home buyers could have the assurance that there's much less likelihood that they'll outgrow the floor plan in just a few years. Instead, they could reconfigure their walls as the family grows or downsizes.
Will these systems find a home in residential application? That's yet to be seen, and the systems are not without challenges. Clearly, easy incorporation into a home when mechanical systems are involved is an issue — both in terms of utility runs and connections, and in regard to air supply and return in forced-air systems. Additional issues include finishes, mounting systems and cost.
Challenges aside, the PATH Concept Home is a great place to see this innovative concept applied. An unexpected and amusing side benefit to this technology was relayed by PATH Concept Home builder Fernando Pages Ruiz. All hands were on deck the week before "opening day" on June 6 to add finishing touches. One of the issues was that the movable wall had been placed in the wrong location.
Lucky for them, the wall was indeed movable. With only minor scratches to the ceiling paint in the home, the movable wall was relocated in time for the opening.
Stacy Hunt is a freelance writer and consultant on building technologies. She is the former business manager for BuildIQ.
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