House Plan Traffic Patterns

Planning house plan traffic patterns can be a task that reminds you of vacation planning. You spend every free moment developing a plan for each days activity from start to finish. Which way is the quickest route, what areas to hit first to avoid traffic and delays, etc. While that may be a stretch from home design and planning, the concept of traffic pattern planning is the underlining focus that coincides with creating the flow or traffic movement in your home. House plan traffic patterns should be carefully considered in the design of each room and the layout of floor plans with relation to the adjoining space.

house plan traffic patterns

Always devote a minimum amount of space to traffic areas. Valuable square footage can be lost if you do not plan accordingly. The most efficient design involves creating the illusion of hallway traffic patterns or passages using furniture placement. This is often seen in open floor plans. They use a minimum amount of interior walls to separate rooms. It involves a bit of forethought by the designer and homeowner, but pro active planning eliminates traffic pattern issues and furniture arrangement for the homeowner. You should keep the size of hallways and corridors should to a minimum. The only purpose it serves is to get you from one room to the next. Make sure that you also keep hallways short in distance.

Avoid design options that only allow access to a room via passage from another room. There are exceptions that include the combining of the formal living room and dining room. In this case, it is an excepted practice because these two areas usually have a tandem function. Nonetheless, the combined rooms will usually have an entry/ exit point at either end of the joined spaces.

Trace Your House Plan Traffic Patterns

One way to effectively determine house plan traffic patterns is to imagine yourself actually moving through the home. If you are planning to build from a set of stock house plans, take the floor plans or a brochure copy of the plan along with a pencil and trace a route through the home. Do this with your daily routine in mind. Take into account a full days activity, including those of your entire household, when tracing the floor plan traffic flow. By doing this, you can see exactly where the lightest and heaviest traffic will happen. You can also determine how and where to place furniture. Ultimately, this exercise will let you know if the floor plan was effectively designed.

If you are creating your very own unique custom home design, floor plan traffic patterns will happen as you connect and determine room placement for each space. This scenario follows the example of the aforementioned vacation planning. You could spend hours, days, or weeks fine tuning the best traffic flow for your home. However, the vested time and effort will be worth the hard work when your planning leads to smooth and easy movement throughout your home.