Restoring the hallway wrongly

[Londonterrace]

Hi Edward,
The original was with the dogleg corridor - I have seen it in person in a different neighbour's house. (And photographically in lots and lots of other houses nearby thanks to the wonder of rightmove )

It was helpful to see their back room - it does take a 4-seater table lengthwise but it really is quite small, and they have taken out their chimney breast whereas we wouldn't. As plasticpigeon says, we have the same room upstairs and it is swamped by a double bed.

[Edward Ian]

Looking at this again, the original layout is not that small. Personally I prefer "rooms" to open plan; I don't want to open the front door and see my entire living space in all its glory (or more likely mess), and that's before the heat loss that you mention.
I guess it depends on how many will be living there - if its a young family, you might prefer open, but if just a couple, why heat the whole house unnecessarily?
Of course, the more walls that you have, the more furniture you can have
If you were to reinstate the hall as was (thus cutting off the kitchen and all its works from your living space) why not have folding diving doors between the sitting room and the dining room? Coupled with a fold down/extendable table, you could then have flexibility to either have a cosy dining room when there are just a few people, to opening up for proper entertaining when there are many.
It depends on your particular needs of course.
And I would also be mindful of the area and what is "trending".

[Londonterrace]

Just coming back in case anyone would like to know what we ended up doing: We initially decided on the straight hallway. However things quickly became complicated - there wasn't enough space for a wall between the stairs and the kitchen doorway. We found some builders who reckoned they could do it in mdf, but that seemed a bit too dubious even to me. We then looked into getting sheets of structural glass to wall off the edge of the stairs, but that was expensive. Finally we wended our way back to the dogleg staircase (plus glazed pocket door). We've now built that, much to the disgust of family and friends, who couldn't understand why we were making our reception rooms smaller. The dining room is a bit tight but it has been a brilliant move for making the house feel like a proper house rather than one big airy but uninviting atrium. And playing with the pocket door mechanism provides hours of entertainment. To get enough space to turn around the stairs we had to move the newel post, replace the bottom stair with a bullnosed one, and have a 'cut off' 45deg face in the front room.

Here are two before pictures and one after (and ignore that it looks much nicer in the before picture...I'm working my way back up to flooring, paint and a tree!):

IMG_20191230_184936.jpg (215.19 KiB) Viewed 200 times

IMG_20200801_104419.jpg (104.93 KiB) Viewed 200 times

IMG_20200918_164106.jpg (85.85 KiB) Viewed 200 times

PS Edward Ian - would love some folding doors but most of the light downstairs comes from the small (West-facing) window in the back room and any frame or arch would cut that down.

[Feltwell]

Looks good! So you're back to pretty much how it was when built, save for the pocket door? I'm no fan of the previous layout you had either.

I'm about to start moving an internal wall here, I feel no guilt. I would if it was downstairs and taking out original cornice etc - but it's not - first floor, plain wall between the bathroom and what would have originally just have been a storage room, now an en-suite bathroom. It will make our stupidly small & narrow family bathroom much more bearable, en-suite will be small but OK, but most importantly it won't do anything to change the character of the place.

[Londonterrace]

Yes, aside from the pocket door, the cut off corner, and the knocked through reception rooms. Enjoy your lovely big bathroom! It sounds like a good decision. I am slowly feeling less beholden to how the house "should" be.

[plasticpigeon]

That looks good. Is this definitely the original layout? If so I assume that the cut of corner would originally have been a curve. My house is similar, but the back room is a thoroughfare.

[lee197960_0]

Looks good. Not always a curve, this is ours.

[Londonterrace]

I would love a few curves but the thought of steaming the skirting board around them puts me off! I like your detailing Lee; I've seen houses that seem to have it at every corner and it looks wonderful:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9ZorX_HdBI ... _copy_link
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6LMfUEnVA7 ... _copy_link