Room Transitions · 10 min read
Designing Room Transitions: The Threshold Decides How Your Home Feels
You carry a tray of coffee from the kitchen to the living room, through a short corridor with two doors and a change of floor, and you nudge the second door open with your elbow. Now imagine the same walk through one wide opening, with the garden in your line of sight the whole way. Picture a detached house from the 1970s in Perchtoldsdorf, recently taken over by a couple in their mid-fifties. It is solidly built and well lit, and yet it feels cramped. Every room has its door, every door is 80 centimetres wide, every room has a different floor. The rooms themselves are not small. It is the transitions that cut the house into pieces. This is where the work begins.
Contents
- What a room transition is
- Three basic forms: closed, semi-open, open
- The transition from kitchen to living room
- The tools: what you design transitions with
- Proportion: how wide and high an opening should be
- Sightlines and the Viennese enfilade
- Thinking of transitions as a sequence
- Designing room transitions: a checklist
- Frequently asked questions
- What happens next
What a room transition is
A room transition is any place where two areas meet. It can be a classic door, an open passage, a glass wall, a change of flooring, a step, an edge in the ceiling or simply a difference in light.
Most planning concentrates on the rooms themselves: which kitchen, which sofa, which bed. The transitions arise incidentally, as leftover space between decisions. That is why many beautifully furnished apartments still feel restless.
We spend more time walking from one room to the next than we think. Each of those steps is a small moment that can be designed.
The threshold is therefore not a side issue. It decides how we enter a room, what we see first and whether we feel invited or shut out.
Leaving the transitions as they are costs you in small steps: the door opened with an elbow, the music in the wrong room, guests who crowd into the kitchen because the living room feels like another house. And a wrong choice stays for decades, be it a lintel built too low or a threshold in the floor. So which forms can a transition take?
Three basic forms: closed, semi-open, open
Room transitions can be sorted by their degree of separation. No form is better than another. What matters is what is meant to happen between the two rooms.
| Form of transition | Typical solution | What it achieves | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| closed | hinged door, floor-to-ceiling door | sound, smell, privacy | bedroom, bathroom, study |
| semi-open | sliding door, glass wall, curtain, wide opening | connection with the option of separation | kitchen to living, workspace, guest room |
| open | zone without a wall, structured only by floor, light and furniture | maximum spaciousness and togetherness | kitchen, dining, living |
Most apartments need all three forms. With our couple in Perchtoldsdorf, this becomes clear quickly. Between kitchen and dining area, both want maximum openness. To the living room there should be a connection that can be closed, because he likes listening to music in the evening while she is still working in the kitchen. And the sleeping area should remain clearly separate.
How the semi-open form works in detail is described in the article Semi-open instead of open. For the step to a fully open kitchen, our article on the open-plan kitchen and living space gives an honest overview. And where does it matter most? Between kitchen and living room.
The transition from kitchen to living room
The most important room transition in most apartments lies between the kitchen and the living room. Two very different life situations meet here: the active, noisy, sometimes untidy kitchen and the calm living space.
A successful transition between kitchen and living room joins the two without making them the same. Usually this happens through a third zone in between: the dining area. The table becomes the hinge where cooking and living meet. Whoever sits at the table is with the cook and at the same time already in the living space.
For our couple, we plan the kitchen so that the island faces the dining area. Behind the dining table begins a wide opening to the living room, 2.40 metres wide, with a floor-to-ceiling timber sliding door that disappears into the wall, made in our own workshop, Tischlerkultur. Open, it is invisible; closed, it becomes a calm wall. How such areas can be organised as zones is shown in the article Zones instead of rooms.
Picture a Friday evening. She cooks at the island and looks across the dining table into the living room, where he has put on a record. Later the door glides into the wall without a sound, and the music stays in the room it was meant for. But walls and doors are not the only tools.
The tools: what you design transitions with
Room transitions are not created only by walls and doors. There are several tools, which work singly or together.
Floor
The floor is the strongest connecting element. A continuous covering lets rooms grow together; a change marks a boundary. Thresholds and transition profiles are often more disruptive than you would think. We deal with this in detail in our article on continuous flooring.
Light
Light can connect or separate rooms without any building work. A warm cone of light above the dining table defines a zone; an evenly lit corridor joins two areas. More on this in our article on light as a room transition.
Ceiling and room height
A change in ceiling height is noticed more strongly than you might expect. A slightly lowered ceiling above the kitchen, taking lighting and extraction, marks the cooking area. The living space next to it feels more generous for its full height.
Colour and material
A change of colour in the right place, such as at a room corner or in a reveal, can mark a boundary. In the wrong place it cuts a wall in two. How to control this is explained in our article on the colour scheme for your home.
Built-ins
A cupboard, a shelf, a bench can itself become the transition. A shelf that can be used from both sides separates dining area and living space and yet lets light and views through. A wardrobe can detach the entrance from the living area. Bespoke fitted wardrobes are often the best means for this, because they fit the opening exactly. And how wide should an opening be?
Proportion: how wide and high an opening should be
The effect of a transition depends strongly on its dimensions. A standard door 80 centimetres wide and 2 metres high clearly separates rooms. The same opening at 1.60 metres wide already changes the room noticeably.
A few guide values from practice:
- 80 to 90 centimetres wide: classic door, clear separation.
- 120 to 160 centimetres: generous passage, the rooms relate to each other.
- from about 2 metres: the rooms begin to read as one room with two areas.
- floor-to-ceiling instead of with a lintel: an opening up to the ceiling feels markedly more open than an opening of the same width with a lintel above it.
That last point is often underestimated. A lintel of 40 centimetres above an opening makes the transition look like a hole in the wall. Where the structure allows, we take openings up to the ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling doors without frames carry this principle through to closed transitions. But an opening is only as good as the view it frames.
Sightlines and the Viennese enfilade
In the Viennese Altbau there is a form of room transition one can learn from: the enfilade. The rooms on the street side are linked along one axis by double-leaf doors. With all doors open, you can see through the entire apartment to the last window.
This principle also works in other floor plans. A transition is especially lovely when it opens a view: onto a window, onto a tree in the garden, onto a picture at the end of the corridor. A transition that points at a blank wall or a fridge wastes this effect.
For the house in Perchtoldsdorf, this means: the new opening between dining area and living room is positioned so that from the kitchen you see across the living space into the garden. The link to the outdoors thus becomes part of the house. How this last transition succeeds is described in our article on the transition to terrace and garden.
Imagine standing at the island at breakfast. Your eye runs across the dining table, through the wide opening, over the oak floor and out into the garden, where the morning sun is on the tree. The house has not grown by a square metre, and yet you feel as though it has.
A good transition shows you where you would like to go next.
Thinking of transitions as a sequence
The loveliest apartments tell a sequence. From the entrance through the living area to the private retreat, things grow calmer, more intimate, more subdued. Each transition is a chapter.
A typical sequence looks like this:
- Arriving. The entrance separates outside and inside, takes jackets and shoes, prepares you. How this works is explained in our article on the entrance area.
- Togetherness. Kitchen, dining and living form the open, lively core.
- Retreat. Study, library or reading corner lie a little apart, reached semi-openly.
- Privacy. Sleeping, dressing and bathing form a sequence of rooms of their own, clearly closed off from the rest. More on this in our article on the private area as a sequence of rooms.
Anyone who recognises this sequence in the floor plan knows where open, semi-open and closed transitions belong. Problems arise when it gets muddled: when you can see into the bedroom straight from the entrance, or the bathroom can be reached only through the living room. Before you open anything, one slow walk through your own apartment answers most of these questions.
Designing room transitions: a checklist
Before you open walls or replace doors, a deliberate walk through the apartment is worthwhile. These questions help:
- What happens on both sides? Which activities, at what times of day, with how many people?
- What should pass through the transition? Views, light, sound, smell, warmth?
- What do you see as you walk through? Is there a focal point, or does the passage point at a leftover surface?
- How does the floor change? Are there thresholds, edges, changes of material?
- How does the light change? From bright to dark, from warm to cold?
- Do you sometimes need separation? And if so, how often and for what?
For our couple in Perchtoldsdorf, these questions meant that not a single wall disappeared completely. Instead, two openings were widened and taken up to the ceiling, a corridor was dissolved, a continuous oak floor was laid and the lighting plan was thought through anew. The house has the same floor area as before and yet feels markedly more generous. At Richard Atelier this is one line of work: the openings, doors and built-ins come from our own workshop, in Viennese joinery tradition since 1935.
Frequently asked questions
What are room transitions?
Room transitions are all the places where two areas of an apartment meet: doors, passages, glass walls, changes of flooring or edges of light. They determine how rooms are connected and how one moves between them. Well-planned transitions make an apartment feel coherent and generous.
How do I design the transition between kitchen and living room?
Best through an intermediary zone, usually the dining area, which lies between cooking and living. A continuous floor joins the areas, and different lighting zones structure them. If you occasionally need quiet, plan a wide opening with a sliding door instead of a completely open space.
How wide should a passage between two rooms be?
That depends on the effect you want. A door of 80 to 90 centimetres separates clearly, a passage of 120 to 160 centimetres connects noticeably, and from about 2 metres two rooms feel like one. A floor-to-ceiling opening without a lintel strengthens the open effect further. Which width suits your rooms also depends on the wall behind it, and we check that on site.
Do I have to remove walls to create flowing spaces?
No. Wider and taller openings, a continuous floor covering and a coordinated lighting plan are often enough. Flowing spaces come from visual relationships and continuity in material and light, not only from the absence of walls. So you can often keep your walls and still gain the feeling of space.
What is an enfilade?
An enfilade is a sequence of rooms whose doors lie along one axis, so that with the doors open you can see through all the rooms. It is typical of Viennese Altbau apartments on the street side. The principle can be carried over to modern floor plans by deliberately aligning openings with focal points.
Do floor-to-ceiling doors make sense?
Floor-to-ceiling doors make transitions feel more generous because the lintel above the door is omitted and the ceiling runs on uninterrupted. They are especially suited to high rooms and to calm, pared-back interiors. Technically, they need careful planning of the frame, the fittings and the stability of the door leaf. When planner and joiner work as one team, those details are solved together.
