The first floor — is usually the family’s daytime living zone. This is where the greatest number of functional rooms is placed. You need to provide space for receiving guests (a living room), a spacious kitchen and an adjoining dining room, a guest room (guest bedroom), possibly a winter garden, and a convenient bathroom as well.
The entrance to the living room and dining room is best made directly from the hallway. As for the kitchen, it should be separated from the hallway so that cooking smells do not permeate the entire house through it.
If there is space, it is better to separate the rooms in which you cook and in which you eat. In principle, when space is limited, the dining room combines very well with the living room. You can then put both a piano and a television there. Although, if there is such an opportunity, it is better to separate them in space as well.
One should strive to form as few through-rooms and corridors as possible.
The second floor, most often — is a zone of rest and quiet, where several bedrooms are arranged, another bathroom, balconies, and access to a terrace.
There should be more bedrooms than family members. Children tend to grow up and no longer wish to share a room with a brother or sister as they did in childhood. And you will be able to receive guests with much greater pleasure if they have somewhere to sleep.
Ancillary rooms. Studies and a library —these rooms require quiet in order to allow for concentration. Therefore they may be placed on the first floor only if you are sure of absolute quiet. If not, the study can be made adjacent to your bedroom so that you can move from one room to the other at any moment, and the library can be placed on the second floor as if in the middle, between the parents’ and children’s rooms, or between the family’s rooms and the guest bedrooms. The library will then become a kind of dividing boundary where two worlds meet.
If you want to make a gym in your country house, then in the layout it is best placed on the first floor. There, where you can make noise without fearing you will disturb anyone.
If your house is large enough and the layout allows something like a balcony or terrace on the second floor, then that will be simply wonderful. Then in the morning you can step out into the air without leaving the room.
The basement floor may also be used — as a service zone (workshop, laundry) or an entertainment one (billiard room, sauna, and so on).
The boiler room is placed separately from the house or in the basement, and if there is none, then on the first floor, and it has its own exit onto the plot.
The garage should be kept as far as possible from the living rooms. From the garage there should be an exit onto the plot and an entrance into the boiler room or the house hallway.
