The noisy, dirty, smelly, ugly truth about open-plan living

For too long you were a Pokey House Person. Through your childhood, you lived in your parent’s pokey house: all dark and warreny, with long skinny corridors that only one person could squeeze through at a time – if two people met halfway, they had to clamber over each other like blind burrowing mole-rats who had never seen sunlight.

In your 20s, you lived in pokey sharehouses: all damp and labyrinthine, with bedrooms coming off bedrooms, most of them occupied by fungal spores who never paid rent or contributed to the kitty. And night after night you lay in your lichenous bed, staring at the low ceiling that was pressed against your nose, and you thought, one day, one day, I will live in an open-plan house, all airy and expansive and unfettered, with no doors, hallways, barriers. Just vast empty space, with a massive David Bromely painting of a tastefully topless woman, a load-bearing one, to hold up the ceiling.

So when you finally found a home of your own, you made sure it was open-plan: it had a kitchen that was one with the dining room, and a dining room that was one with a living room, and a living room that had big bi-folding doors leading out to the backyard, so it could be one with the infinite open-plan cosmos. You even had a bedroom that was one with an en suite bathroom, with no door or screen or anything, because you and your partner are modern, sophisticated Open-Planners with nothing to hide from each other. And after about a week, you both started using the other bathroom, on the other side of the house, with the lockable door and the noisy exhaust fan.

A few months later, you were unloading the dishwasher in the kitchen and your partner was watching TV in the living room, then she turned up the volume to drown out your unloading, and you unloaded louder to drown out the TV then you had a fight and she stormed off to another room – if there was a door there, she would have slammed it. From then on, you had to stop unloading the dishwasher at night. And boiling the kettle at night. And doing any kind of night-time cooking activities apart from quiet stove-top braising, and gentle potato-mashing with a soft noiseless rubber spatula.

Not long after that, you had friends over for Sunday brunch, and you were all sitting around the dining room, enjoying the food, enjoying the chatter, when you heard a long, loud nasal snort, with a mildly-amusing after-hoik. It was your son in the back shower, performing the opening aria to his 20-minute Phlegm-Clearing Operetta, delivered with pristine clarity because your open-plan house has the acoustical amplification of St Peter’s Basilica. After that, you stopped entertaining, and playing loud music, and having private conversations, and making love.

So now you still love your airy, expansive, unfettered open-plan house, but you’ve just made a few tweaks, some minor adjustments. No, that’s not a door on your en suite bathroom; it’s a stylish Danish privacy partition in solid teak, with a handle and hinges. No, those are not walls going around the kitchen: they’re Japanese shoji screens made of the same stuff they use for noise barriers on the Monash Freeway. No, that’s not a corridor going through the middle of your house – it’s bookshelves, filled with sound-absorbing books, arranged in the shape of a corridor. A long, skinny corridor that only one person can squeeze through at a time.

Danny Katz is a columnist with The Age.