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PORCH
BATH
KITCHEN
BEDROOM
DINING
POWDER
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DECK
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LIVING AREA
BEDROOM
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ENTRY
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First Floor
Great rooms have been fixtures in log homes for the past 30 years. Even though homeowners welcome the openness, some wonder how to make it livable. The secret to a great great room is space management.
Great rooms combine the living, dining and kitchen areas that in most homes are separated by walls. The concept is so commonplace in log homes, however, that almost every plan labels living rooms as “great rooms.”
Great rooms derive from the grand halls of medieval European manors. Pioneer cabins of North America had great rooms, at least in the sense that the entire interior was one open space: When blankets hung on ropes and then full-fledged partition walls divided the living and sleeping areas, the living space still qualified as a great room, even though early kitchens were outdoors.
Once cabins grew to full-fledged houses, they tended to compartmentalize. It was the grand lodges of the West that opened up layouts and inspired today’s great rooms.
Their chief reward is allowing outside natural light and views to reach all corners of the public space. The openness also pro-
motes the informality for which log homes are famous.
Eliminating walls and halls does create vastness, however, and bothers homeowners accustomed to formal room divisions. Where does the living space stop and the eating space start?
Successful great rooms prevent overlap while preserving openness. Recently, log-home designers have begun subdividing space to introduce more coziness. If you’ve stood in the main hall of a lodge, you’ve probably noticed how space is broken into separate, intimate sitting or activity areas.
This tactic works in family-size homes, too. Here are eight great room strategies log-home owners favor.
1. Group areas. The distinctions can be subtle or significant. Use cues to indicate function, such as dining tables, kitchen cabinets and windows, and then group furnishings around them.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN LOG HOMES
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This great room layout includes four distinct areas: “Command post” kitchen, dining area, sitting area, and loft. The snack bar and loft posts serve as dividing areas for the more open sections of the room. Including the loft, this three-bedroom, two-bath loft chalet is only 1,786 square feet, but seems like a much larger area.
One way to manage openness is to look up. We tend to think of great rooms as a layout on a two-dimensional floor plan, but we live in our
Trusses bring
homes three-dimensionally. Since
overhead volume
most great rooms have tall, usually
down to earth.
pitched cathedral ceilings, part of
space management is bringing the
overhead volume more down to earth.
Huge ceiling light fixtures are one solu-
tion, but a loggier way is to add roof
trusses.
A familiar sight in larger great rooms, where they provide support for the roof, trusses can be added to smaller rooms for support or just for looks. Yes, they cost extra, but they really enhance the log look. The key is to make sure trusses are in proportion to the space they occupy. Strive for beams that are big enough to look like they actually are holding up the roof but not so big as to look ponderous enough to fall down on top of you.
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