How can we make the most of a house's view?

How can you unlock the layout of your home, to maximise views, and practicality?

For this project the client has a bungalow, the original part here, with an existing extension containing a bedroom, bath and utility room to the side, what’s currently a garage to the other side, and a further extension he has planning for here, containing a study / 3rd bedroom. It’s in a lovely spot in the channel islands, with a view down to the town and the sea to the south here.

The existing proposals show many of the internal walls removed, which are structural and would need to be replaced with steels above the ceiling. This makes an L-shaped open plan kitchen living dining space, with the garage converted into a walk in wardrobe and main bedroom ensuite.

The client isn’t an American, so didn’t feel he needed a walk in wardrobe, normal wardrobes in the bedroom would be fine, and he’s prefer to keep the garage as a kind of hobby / workshop space than convert it. His other concern was that he’d prefer to have acoustic separation possible between the kitchen so different people can do different things.

My feeling was that there was a lot of structural work in removing the walls, but so much opening up was making a very wide space for a normal ceiling height, which can start to feel compressed.

So one option we proposed was to flip over the kitchen and main bedroom, so the main bedroom can use the utility room space for it’s en suite, and the utility room stuff can go in the workshop hobby space. The kitchen and dining are arranged along an axis, with double doors allowing separation. The kitchen looks over the front in a neighbourly way, to the front garden which gets the afternoon sun. And a column or two help define the dining area as a separate zone, which reduces the need for steels above.

Then this alternative arranges all the main rooms around the primary view to the sea. A big square sitting room, the kitchen screened by a large sliding door, then the dining area in a cosy, focused space at the end of the enfilade of interlinked spaces.

We’re keeping more of the structure in the front of the house, the existing bathroom becomes an ‘off-suite’ to the main bedroom, and keeping the utility room means the hobby room could count as a fourth bedroom.

So we could spend that structure money on a line of columns, full width glazing behind, to maximise the expansive views from the inside of the house down to the sea. You’d need some solar shading to this to prevent overheating, so why not plant vines? Lovely!

So if you’d like us to unlock the layout of your property, get in touch through the link in the bio!