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What makes a good floor plan? There is no secret. Self-knowledge.

No floor plan is good for every household. A plan is good when it consistently serves the life you intend to live in it — which is why reviewing one starts not with the drawing, but with who uses it.

András Krizbai · Last verified: August 2026

You build your first house for your enemy

There is an old saying about building: you build your first house for your enemy, the second for your friend, the third for yourself. Anyone who has built a house or lived through a serious renovation understands where it comes from. The first time, you have to make hundreds of decisions you did not know existed. By the time the house is finished, you can see exactly what you would do differently. Fortunately, you do not have to build three houses to learn from them.

A floor plan is a portrait of the household that lives in it. It shows how much you like being together, how much quiet you need, whether you cook, whether you work from home, how much you own, whether you host — and whether your ordinary weekdays resemble the life you imagined when the plan was drawn.

When someone shows me a plan and asks "is this any good?", something is almost always missing from the answer. I would need to know who it was drawn for.

Shift left: a mistake is cheapest where it was made

Software engineering has a term for this: shift left — find defects as early as possible, while changing them is still easy and cheap. The same habit is unusually valuable in construction. Moving a door on a drawing takes seconds. After the blockwork it is unpleasant. After tiling, first fix and bespoke joinery it is a different order of cost entirely.

And a house in use can be at least as complex as a substantial piece of software. Take a two-storey family house with five people, a dog and a cat. In the morning one person is showering, one is making breakfast, two children are leaving for school, someone is on a video call, and a courier arrives. In the afternoon: homework, cooking, laundry, sport. In the evening: guests. Or take the opposite extreme — two people trying to live in 25 m² and still each keep a small territory of their own.

The drawn plan is already the output of a process. The real work starts earlier: with trying to understand your own life.

Life stage first, room count second

I do not mean how many bedrooms you want — that follows. First answer what stage of life you are in. Are you moving in together? Expecting a child? A second one? Will the children move out in a few years? Will you be caring for an elderly parent? Do you work from home a great deal? Do you travel for weeks and come back jetlagged? Do you host often?

Or perhaps once a month you host a twelve-person tabletop role-playing session. It sounds like a frivolous example; in planning terms it is not. If something happens regularly in your home, it has a spatial requirement and a consequence. A family of four may need a table for four, or for six. If fourteen people sit down together every Christmas, that is worth knowing too.

The same floor plan can be excellent for two people and unliveable for six.

Start with the home you live in now

Before you start collecting images of your future home, make two lists: five things you love about where you live now, and five you really do not. Do not reach for architectural language. One may be that the morning sun reaches the kitchen. Another that there is never anywhere to put shoes. You love seeing the garden from bed; you are driven mad by having to cross half the flat to reach the laundry basket.

Watch for the same thing elsewhere — at a friend's, in a hotel, in a holiday house. Sometimes we know precisely that a place is good to be in, without ever working out why. It may not be the marble. It may simply be that the door is where it ought to be.

Use your own body

Dimensions are easier to remember once you have felt them. Measure a long stride. Check how high you can comfortably reach. Try turning around in a tight space wearing a winter coat with a bag on your shoulder. If you turn a full circle with your elbows out you will look a little like MC Hammer in U Can't Touch This — and something that is easy to forget on a plan becomes immediately obvious.

Dimensions are not verified with your arms, of course — that is what the drawing and the tape measure are for. Your own body is there to make those dimensions mean something in use.

The regulatory minimum is not a design target

There are numerical requirements as well. In Hungary, minimum room sizes and dwelling-function requirements were set for decades by OTÉK (Government Decree 253/1997. (XII. 20.)); from 2025 this is being progressively replaced by TÉKA (Government Decree 280/2024. (IX. 30.)), whose provisions apply from 1 July 2025 at the earliest. Which one governs a given project depends on the regulation in force at the time, the transitional provisions and the local building code — it has to be checked case by case, never quoted from memory. Every jurisdiction has its own equivalent, and the principle below holds in all of them.

A regulatory minimum and a comfortably usable space are not the same thing. A WC can be exactly compliant and still be miserable to use if the door swings the wrong way, the basin is in the wrong place, or the approach is awkward. Regulation sets a frame. Design is a great deal more than that.

Read the plan from the entrance

When I see a plan I know nothing about, I usually look for the entrance first. It sounds banal; it is not always obvious. I build the house in my head starting from the door. Where do I arrive? What do I see first? Where do I take off my coat? Where do the shoes go? Is there room for a bag, an umbrella, a school rucksack, a bicycle helmet?

Many plans have a room labelled "entrance hall". That does not guarantee it is where the household actually arrives. If everyone uses a different door from the garage or the garden every day, that is functionally the entrance — and that is the point the plan should be read from.

The yellow marker

My simplest method needs no particular equipment. I used to lay tracing paper over the plan, take a thick yellow marker, and draw how people would actually move. Try it. Do not draw walls. Draw routes.

After a few minutes you will see the same drawing differently. Every room may be adequately sized and yet the routes cross each other constantly. Or a guest has to walk past the bedrooms to reach the WC. Or the weekly shop has to travel through three doors and the whole living room to reach the pantry. These are far easier to spot when you draw a day's events onto the plan instead of rooms.

Design for the ordinary day and the peak

There is everyday use, and there are the moments when suddenly there is more of everything: more people, more coats, more plates, more cars, more noise. Four people may live in the house and fourteen may regularly eat in it. It is worth thinking through at least three situations: how the house works on an ordinary day; what happens at realistic peak load; and whether there are particular life events you want to be ready for.

You do not need an entrance hall sized for fourteen people. But it helps to know where the fourteen coats will go.

In the kitchen, the island is not the first question

Kitchens are very easy to start designing from the image: an island, a breakfast bar, a run of tall units. I would look first at how food gets from the fridge to the table. The simplest sequence is storage → preparation → cooking. Then washing up, waste, serving — and, of course, how many people use the kitchen at once.

The work triangle is a useful handhold, but it solves nothing on its own. A single-run kitchen can work beautifully; a photogenic island kitchen can be an irritation every single day. Here too the first question is use, not form.

Where do you keep what you do not want to see?

It is easy to find room for what we are happy to display: the sofa, the artwork, the lamp, the bookshelves. The harder question is where the vacuum cleaner, the suitcases, the mop, the Christmas decorations, the laundry, the dog food, the sports kit, the children's rucksacks, the guest bedding, the ironing board, the router and the building services will go.

A household's storage requirement cannot be judged from the linear metres of wardrobe alone. That becomes clear, reliably, only after moving in.

A plan is only one section through the space

Look up from the paper. What is the ceiling height? Is there a suspended ceiling? Which way do the windows face? Where does the sun come from? What happens to a south-facing room in July? How do you ventilate? Where is the shading? Where do the services run?

A 12 m² room with a three-metre ceiling is a completely different spatial experience from the same area under a much lower one. Past a certain point, a plan can no longer be read from above alone.

So when is a floor plan good?

Perhaps that is exactly the question that misleads us. What is worth examining is how consistently the plan serves the life you want to live in it. Which means first understanding who uses it, where they arrive from, how they move, where they like to be together, where they want to withdraw, what they store, how they cook, how they do laundry, when there are many of them and when they need quiet.

Only then can you talk sensibly about what works, what should change, where an exact dimension needs checking — and what cannot responsibly be judged from the information available. That last one is not a failure. Sometimes the most useful outcome of reviewing a plan is discovering what still has to be asked.

This is what RENterior Senior Interior Review is for

I started working on RENterior because I wanted to make this way of thinking available in a form anyone can try. RENterior Senior Interior Review will be a downloadable AI skill — not a separate application. You download it from ren.design and give it to whichever LLM you already use: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another capable system. Then you upload your floor plan to the same place.

There are two ways to use it. In the first, it interviews you: how many people use the home, whether there are children, how you live, how much you cook, whether anyone works from home, where the entrance is, what is known about orientation. In the second, you give it no background at all and ask instead: review my floor plan without assuming anything about me; state what can be read from it with confidence, what questions arise, and what cannot be verified from the available information.

RENterior is not built to replace a designer. It is built to help you ask better questions — of yourself, and of the professional you work with — before a purchase, a renovation or a build. The skill cites its sources: where a regulation, standard, chamber or academic reference is involved, it says so, and it does not blend those with Ren Design's own professional position. Where the data is insufficient, it has to say that too.

A design cannot be finished

There is another saying I understand better with every year of practice: a design can only be abandoned, never finished. There is always something more. A door could move. A wall could be refined. The lighting could be reconsidered. A better detail could be found. But a moment arrives when you have to decide and start building. The goal is not perfection. It is having worked through the questions that matter by then.

Do that in time and you are less likely to find yourself saying the sentence one hears from a surprising number of people after a build: "if I were starting the house again, I would certainly do this differently." You probably cannot avoid every one of them. But the more questions you ask while there are still only lines on a screen, the fewer answers you have to give later by taking down a wall.

How to survive the build itself is the subject of a later piece. Until then: When to bring in an interior designer → · How much clearance a kitchen island needs →

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