The Most Overrated Trend in Modern Home Design

Open concept was supposed to be the answer. For a lot of Toronto homes — it's actually the problem.

Open concept floor plan at Trinity Bellwoods project Toronto, ON

Still here? Good. Because this is the conversation most interior designers in Toronto won't have with you — at least not before you've signed anything.

Open concept floor plans have dominated residential design for over a decade. Walk through any new build in Etobicoke, any renovation in North York, any condo flip in the downtown core — and you'll find the same thing: walls removed, rooms merged, one continuous space presented as the pinnacle of modern living.

We've designed enough projects across the GTA to know when it works brilliantly — and when it quietly ruins a home.

First: What Is An Open Concept Floor Plan?

An open concept layout removes the interior walls that traditionally separate rooms with different functions. The most common version combines kitchen, dining, and living into one continuous space. It can extend to bedrooms, home offices, and dressing areas.

The promise:

• One large, unified living area

• Better natural light throughout

• Zones that flow into each other without interruption

  
  

In the right home, for the right client, this delivers exactly what it promises.

The problem is it gets applied to every home, for every client, regardless of whether it should.

When Open Concept Is The Right Call

Small square footage.

When you're working with a tight footprint — a semi-detached in the Annex, a narrow Victorian in Leslieville — removing walls is often the smartest move available. It maximizes usable space, pulls light deeper into the floor plan, and makes a genuinely small home feel livable rather than cramped. Our Trinity Bellwoods project is a direct example: limited second-floor square footage, kitchen and dining and living all sharing one space, none of them feeling shortchanged.

Indoor-outdoor connection.

If your renovation includes panoramic sliding doors or a rear addition opening to the backyard, an open plan makes that connection seamless. For hosting, for families who want sightlines across the space, for resale value in the GTA market — it works.

Those are real, legitimate reasons. Now here's where it stops working.

The 3 Problems Nobody Tells You About

1. Open Concept Doesn't Hide How You Actually Live

An open plan doesn't contain your life. It puts it on display.

Busy households — and most of our clients in Vaughan, Mississauga, and North York are exactly that — generate real-life disorder. Dishes, bags, mail, homework, the aftermath of a dinner party. In a home with defined rooms, that disorder stays contained. In an open plan, it's visible from every corner of the floor.

The scale of clutter in an open space feels twice as large as the same clutter in a closed room. That's not a design opinion. That's how the eye reads scale.

2. Open Concept Does Not Equal Good Flow

This is the part that gets lost in every open concept conversation.

Removing walls creates space. It does not automatically create flow. Flow comes from intentional furniture placement, defined zones, considered traffic patterns — the work of interior design, not demolition.

Without that work, a large open floor plan becomes a room where furniture sits by default rather than by intention. Zones blur. The kitchen smell fills the entire floor. Sound travels without interruption. What looked effortless in the staged photos becomes exhausting to maintain in real life.

Private countryside residence project with floor plan by Axel Vervoordt

3. It Has Produced a Generation of Identical Homes

When every home looks the same, none of them feel like yours.

Open concept has been applied so broadly, for so long, that it has become the architectural equivalent of a blank canvas — clean, neutral, and completely forgettable.

There is something genuinely striking about a Toronto home that uses archways, material changes, or intentional wall separations to define its character. Enclosures are not outdated. Used deliberately, they create grandeur, privacy, and — most importantly — identity.

The Home Alone house renovation is the perfect case study in what gets lost.

A beloved, instantly recognizable home. Maximalist by today's standards, yes — but with a presence and soul that made it unforgettable. After the renovation: open, clean, indistinguishable from any other high-budget project you've scrolled past this week. You would not recognize it in a listing. That is not an upgrade. That is erasure.

So Is Open Concept Overrated?

Yes — when it's applied by default. No — when it's applied by design.

The trend itself isn't the problem. The reflexive application of it is.

Walls, separation, defined rooms — these are not old-fashioned ideas. They are tools. In the hands of an interior designer who understands how a specific family lives in a specific home in a specific neighbourhood of Toronto, they produce spaces that feel intentional, warm, and livable in a way that a single open room rarely does.

The homes that age best are the ones designed around how people actually live — not around how the space will look in the listing.

Before You Remove Any Walls — Read This

If you're planning a renovation in Toronto or the GTA and open concept is on your list, these are the questions worth answering first:

• How do you actually use your main floor on a Tuesday morning? Not a dinner party Saturday — a regular Tuesday.

• Do you have sightlines you want, or sightlines you're forced into? There's a difference.

• What are you trying to solve — more light, more space, better flow? Each of those has a solution. They're not all the same solution.

• Is your home large enough that an open plan creates scale — or small enough that defined zones would actually serve you better?

  
  

A good interior design consultation in Toronto costs a fraction of what it costs to put a wall back after you've taken it down.

TA Design Studios is a Toronto-based interior design and build firm working on residential renovation projects across the GTA — including Etobicoke, North York, Vaughan, Mississauga, and Toronto proper. If you're planning a renovation and want an honest assessment of what your space actually needs, start here.