How Do You Approach Privacy in Open-Plan Designs?
Privacy in open-plan designs is a common concern for homeowners and designers alike. This article delves into effective strategies for maintaining personal space while preserving the airy feel of open layouts. Drawing from expert insights, we explore innovative solutions like wood slat dividers that offer both style and functionality.
- Design Tactics for Open-Plan Privacy
- Balancing Openness and Intimacy in Homes
- Wood Slat Dividers: Stylish Privacy Solution
Design Tactics for Open-Plan Privacy
Creating Privacy in the Open Plan Office
By Ambar Margarida, IIDA, WELL AP, LEED Green Associate
Principal at Spacesmith
Gone are the days of full-height panels and enclosed cubicles. Today's open plan offices demand thoughtful strategies that support privacy without sacrificing openness. At architecture and design firm Spacesmith, we've developed a range of design tactics to meet this challenge across a variety of workplace environments, as detailed below.
Zoning & Circulation
Establishing zones for private and shared spaces can help distinguish different work environments in an open layout. For the headquarters of publisher Abrams Books, for instance, the design team at Spacesmith created zoning and circulation areas to separate focused work areas from collaborative zones, with carefully planned pathways acting as natural buffers. Bookcases double as partitions, offering visual privacy while preserving openness. Desk layouts are placed to minimize direct sightlines and enhance a sense of personal space.
Acoustic Privacy
Integrating elements that minimize ambient noise is another way to ensure that private spaces remain undisturbed, as for the headquarters of financial technology company MarketAxess, where acoustic privacy was essential. For this workplace, Spacesmith's design team incorporated large-format, seamless acoustic ceilings, wall panels, and carpet tiles to mitigate noise from speech and foot traffic. In addition, enclosed quiet rooms and focus spaces provide options for deep work and confidential conversations.
Visual Definition
Visual strategies can also help define separate work areas in offices that have an open plan. Layered lighting, for example, and frosted glass panels offer subtle spatial cues and separation without physical barriers.
When paired with a culture of respect and clear behavioral norms, these design elements help foster a focused, productive environment. Ultimately, designing privacy into open-plan offices is less about building walls and more about thoughtful layering.
Balancing Openness and Intimacy in Homes
Open floor plan designs are increasingly popular in residential architecture, and for good reason. These designs create a more efficient use of space by integrating hallways, or "circulation," into the livable areas of a home. Common spaces such as kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms start to engage with each other, and the lines between them are blurred in an open concept floor plan. These spaces feel larger even in a small footprint, simply by removing the walls between them.
However, one of the biggest design challenges with these kinds of floor plans is preserving privacy while simultaneously creating open concepts. Maintaining privacy in open floor plans is twofold: establishing boundaries between people within the space and shielding people inside from the outside world.
In our practice, we often think about sightlines - meaning, what can a person see from any given spot and how can the architecture control this? This can be done with intentional placement of windows or the expanding and contracting of spaces with the use of thresholds.
For example, one challenge that we commonly come across is screening a home from the street without creating a completely opaque facade at the front of a house. Perhaps windows can be placed high above or down below the sightline so users on the inside get the benefit of natural light without the visual disturbance of the street. Alternatively, perhaps the entrance of a home is a smaller, cozier space to create the effect of being confined; then upon entry, the space opens up and the inhabitant feels as if the room has expanded.
This play with volumes can also be used at the ceiling plane in a large, open concept floor plan. In order to create pockets within an open floor plan, such as a living room and a reading nook, we will often utilize varying ceiling heights to distinguish between two spaces even though they are part of one larger space. A lower ceiling height at the reading nook can make the space feel more intimate and private than the living room with a taller, more grand ceiling height.
These are just a few of the design techniques we use to create a feeling of privacy in an open floor plan.
Wood Slat Dividers: Stylish Privacy Solution
Depending on the floor plan and privacy necessities, there are several ways this can be addressed. Our most popular product in design right now (used in many projects and in many different ways) and my personal favorite is the wood slat room divider. One of our vendors manufactures a one-of-a-kind model, perfect for different types of applications. It's a stylish partition that creates separation while simultaneously elevating the aesthetic appeal.
(I'm happy to provide photos from different applications)
