Family Apartment Planning: A Home That Grows with Your Children, Not Out of Space

Planning a family apartment: why the layout has to grow with you

Families change faster than apartments. Between the birth of the first child and the departure of the last lie twenty to twenty-five years in which needs shift almost every year. A baby needs closeness, a schoolchild a desk, a teenager a door that can be closed.

Most apartments are set up for one of these moments and then no longer fit the next. The consequence is either a move or a series of makeshift solutions: a bunk bed, a room divider from the furniture store, a desk in the bedroom.

A family apartment that grows with you is planned differently. The fixed elements, that is walls, pipes and cables, bathrooms and built-ins, are laid out so that they carry several stages. The movable elements, that is furniture, beds and textiles, change with the children. This way of thinking is at the heart of a whole-home design concept.

What it costs to do nothing. The cost of waiting is rarely dramatic. It is the daily detour around the pram, the desk in the bedroom, the evening tidy-up that takes an hour. The makeshift solutions multiply each year, and the later you start, the more must be undone. Planning the stages now keeps a move optional.

The stages of a family and what the apartment needs

Before we draw a single line, we go through the coming years with the parents. The overview below shows how the requirements change.

This table also shows why the order of decisions matters. Anyone who thinks only of the baby today may block the division of a room in five years' time. Anyone who thinks of the teenagers already plans two doors and two windows today in a room that is at first shared. So how do you build that in without a single wall too many?

Flexible layouts: rooms that can be divided and joined

A flexible layout is one in which rooms can be divided, joined or repurposed with manageable effort. In the Viennese Altbau, with its large rooms and double doors, this is often more feasible than in a new build with tight rooms.

Take an Altbau flat in Ottakring, four rooms, just under a hundred square metres, a two-year-old and a second child on the way. The largest room, with two windows, becomes the children's room for both. It gets two doors now, separate light switches and sockets on both sides. In a few years a partition wall can be put in, and one large room becomes two smaller rooms, each with its own window and door. Until then it is a generous playroom.

The former half-office becomes a study with a sliding door to the living area. During the day the door stands open, and the room feels like an extension of the living room. In the evening or during video calls it is closed. How such semi-open solutions are designed is described in the article Semi-open instead of open. For working at home there is the article on the home office in the apartment.

What matters is that the electrical planning already knows this future. Sockets, switches and light outlets for a later division are easy to provide for during the renovation. Retrofitted later, it means chasing, filling and repainting in an occupied children's room. More on this in the article on electrical planning.

A layout that grows with you is already finished today. It just does not have all its walls yet.

Children's rooms: one room, two children, three life stages

The children's room is the room that changes most. So that you do not have to buy new every few years, we rely on built-ins that go along with the child. A made-to-measure wardrobe with adjustable shelves and hanging rails that can move upwards lasts from baby bodysuit to teenage jacket. A desk that is at first a painting table is later adjusted in height.

For two children in one room, a clear structure helps. Each child has their own area with bed, shelf and reading light. In the middle is a shared play area. When it is later divided, each child gets their part, and the built-ins stay where they are.

Picture the evening in that room: a reading lamp at each bed, the shelves at exactly the right height for small hands, and a wardrobe door that closes without a sound once the toys are inside. Our joinery Tischlerkultur builds such pieces in a Viennese tradition that began in 1935, made for decades rather than for the next growth spurt.

How to plan a children's room for the years from three to thirteen is described in the article A children's room that grows with the child. Whether a made-to-measure fitted wardrobe or a modular wardrobe makes more sense for a children's room is explained in the article Made-to-measure fitted wardrobe or modular system.

Storage: the underrated family topic

Hardly anything grows as fast in a family as the number of things. Prams, balance bikes, scooters, toys, sports equipment, clothes in five sizes, craft supplies, schoolbooks. Without a storage concept they end up on the floor, on chairs and in the corners. These questions help with planning:

• Where do pram, balance bike and scooter go without blocking the hallway?
• Is there a fixed place for jacket, shoes and bag for each person?
• Where are clothes and toys stored that are not needed right now?
• How many toys should be in the living area, and where do they disappear in the evening?
• Where are supplies, cleaning products and the vacuum cleaner kept?
• Is there a place for sports and leisure equipment used only seasonally?

In our Ottakring example, a floor-to-ceiling bespoke cloakroom is created in the hallway, with one compartment per family member, a bench and an open space for pram and balance bike, which later becomes a shoe rack. In the living room there is a low built-in bench with large drawers in which the toys vanish in the evening. The principle is described in the article on the storage concept for the whole apartment. You can see examples of such solutions on our page about fitted wardrobes. And once the things have a home, the kitchen can finally be what it wants to be.

Kitchen and dining area as the heart of the family

In a family, the kitchen is rarely there only for cooking. Homework is done here, stories are told, conflicts are resolved and birthdays are celebrated. The kitchen should therefore have a sight line to the dining area and the play area. The person cooking wants to see what the children are doing, and the children want to be close to their parents.

Here the wall between the kitchen and the adjoining room is opened. The kitchen gets an island with one side where the children can sit, help or draw. The dining table stands right next to it and is large enough for six people, so that grandparents and friends have room too. Imagine a Sunday: flour on the island, a child kneading dough, the grandparents arriving, and a table that simply takes everyone. How to make kitchen and dining room one space is shown in the article Kitchen and dining room as one room.

An open room with children can get loud. Rugs, curtains and upholstered benches help dampen the sound, as described in the article on acoustics in the open living space. You will find our services around fitted kitchens on the service page.

Bathroom and hallway: the bottlenecks of family life

Every family knows the moment at 7:15 a.m. Four people want the bathroom at the same time, the toothbrushes are all mixed up, and someone is looking for the second shoe in the hallway. These bottlenecks decide the mood of the whole morning.

In the bathroom, a vanity unit with two basins, a shower usable separately from the tub, and a separate WC help. A made-to-measure vanity unit with a drawer for each family member creates order. For small children, a pull-out step can be integrated into the plinth. How such a vanity unit is planned is described in the article Made-to-measure vanity units. If the bathroom is being renewed anyway, you will find more on our page about bathroom renovation.

The hallway is the second bottleneck. Here people get dressed, put things down, search and say goodbye. A well-planned hallway with fixed places for each person speeds up the morning and calms the evening. More on this in the article on arriving well in the entrance area.

Materials that children can withstand

Children test every surface. They draw on walls, drive the ride-on car into cupboard doors and spill juice on the floor. A family apartment therefore needs materials that are robust and age well.

An oiled oak floor is a good example. Scratches can be repaired locally, and over the years a patina develops that adds to the character of the apartment. For fronts, hard-wearing matt lacquers or veneer with a robust finish are suitable. Wall paints in scrub-resistant quality can be wiped clean. Worktops in Dekton cope with hot pans and knives.

Which surfaces still look good after years is described in the article Easy to care for? Which surfaces still look good after five years. And if the apartment does eventually become too small despite all the planning, there may be a solution next door, as the article on combining two apartments shows.