Get the Most from Older Home Design

Older homes have a lot going for them: They’re often well-built, as demonstrated by the fact that they’re still standing after all this time, they’re often beautiful and filled with the charm and grace of a by-gone age, and there’s a sense of life to them – the collective energies of the people and families that have lived there over the decades.

Of course, along with the charm come some challenges. Older home design pre-dates some modern conveniences, and sometimes older homes date back to prior lifestyles. This means that charming older homes may have some rooms with mysterious purposes, or a layout that has far more walls and far smaller rooms than modern tastes prefer. You can of course solve these problems with a massive renovation, but aside from being incredibly expensive this can also destroy much of the charm that an older home offers. If a renovation in your older house is out of the question for some reason, here are other ways to make it work in the modern sense.

Choose the Master Strategically

The concept of the Master Bedroom with an en-suite bathroom is a modern one, and many older homes lack a true Master. Even what is usually marketed as the Master bedroom is often not much larger than the other bedrooms, and usually has no bathroom or even much wardrobe space to speak of. However, just because the real estate agent has marketed a certain bedroom as the ‘master’ (likely because of its location in the home) doesn’t mean you have to stick with that choice.

Instead, an older home design strategy is to choose a smaller bedroom that’s nearer to the bathroom. While this can’t replace the convenience of an en-suite bathroom, it can approximate the experience, and that might be enough to make the home feel a bit more modern.

Sacrifice a Bedroom for a Wardrobe

Older homes often come with very small closets – people in past times simply had much less stuff. The wardrobes can often seem comically small, in fact, and if your home is old enough they may not even be deep enough for modern hangers, which didn’t exist years ago. While solutions include a minor renovation to build in new wardrobe, or the addition of free-standing furniture, these reduce the size of what may already be a modest master bedroom.

There are many ideas concerning how to best deal with a lack of wardrobes in an older home (see here for some great ones). One idea is to consider taking the nearest bedroom to the master and converting it into a large walk-in wardrobe. If it’s right next door you could even consider relocating the door to link it directly to the master and cut it off from the hallway, but even if you don’t take this step, just having the large storage space is often enough to make the older house more liveable to modern sensibilities.

Older homes have their charms – and with just a little creativity their defects can be compensated for, making them just as comfortable and useful as their modern counterparts while leaving their charm and history intact. And when you’ve made your decisions and need to spruce up the place a bit, click here and let us help you with the art on the walls.