A Life Concept for Your Home: Rooms That Grow Out of How You Live

What a life concept for your home is

A life concept is a description of your daily life that serves as the foundation for planning. It records who is where and when, what happens there and what is needed for it. Only then do we decide which wall stays, where the kitchen goes and what a surface is made of.

At Richard Atelier we call this approach Human-Centered Living Design. The person stands at the centre, not the object. So our guiding question is never "How should the room look?" but "How do you want to live?" The answer does not describe rooms. It describes situations: how you cook, how you rest, how you come together.

A life concept is the first stage of a whole-home design concept. It does not replace the planning, it gives the planning a direction. Without that direction every later decision becomes a matter of taste, and taste can be argued about for years. What would a whole home look like if every decision pointed the same way?

Why furnishing so often misses daily life

Most apartments are planned by room function. A living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. Each room receives the furniture its name suggests: a sofa and a television in the living room, a table in the dining room, a shoe cabinet in the hallway.

Life, however, ignores room names. The M. family's daughter does her homework at the dining table, because that is where the light and the company are. Her father reads in the bedroom, because the living room is too loud. Guests stand in the kitchen. The rooms are correctly furnished and wrongly used.

A room is not what it was built for. It is what happens in it.

Furnishing that looks only at room functions fills surfaces. A life concept asks which habits and wishes those surfaces must support. You will not see the difference in a photograph. You will feel it on an ordinary Tuesday evening. So what does a single day reveal?

A day with the M. family: daily life as a floor plan

Let us follow the M. family through one day, exactly as we would in a first conversation with them.

6:40 a.m., the morning. Both parents have to leave the house, and so does their daughter. Upstairs there is one bathroom. Two people want the washbasin at the same moment, and a third waits outside the door. In the kitchen the coffee machine sits in the far corner, and anyone who wants a cup has to squeeze past the open dishwasher.

7:30 a.m., heading out. Shoes, bags and a cycling helmet lie in the hallway. The key has no fixed place, so every morning ends with a small search.

6:30 p.m., cooking. The mother loves to cook and is good at it, but she does it alone, because the kitchen is too narrow for two. The father would help and ends up in the way. The daughter, in the next room, is out of earshot.

9:00 p.m., unwinding. The living room faces the television. Anyone who wants to read has neither good light nor quiet, so the family scatters across three rooms.

Saturday, getting together. Six friends arrive for dinner. The table was made for four and grows a leaf. The guests wait in the kitchen until the food is served, and it is cramped and loud.

This one day produces more requirements than any mood board. The bathroom needs two washing places. The hallway needs closed storage with a fixed place for everything, as described in the article on arriving well in the entrance area. The kitchen needs a side where two people can work together, and a connection to the dining table. And the living room needs at least one second spot that does not face the screen.

Now imagine the same Saturday after the change. The coats vanish into a bench-lined wall of oak, and a glass is in every hand before the door has closed. The host stands at the island, talking, while the sauce simmers behind her. Nobody is in the way, and the evening starts the moment the doorbell rings. How do you turn a day like this into a plan?

Life situations instead of room functions

The step from daily routine to plan works when you replace room functions with life situations. The overview below shows how that changes what we plan.

This table is not a recipe, and another family would fill it differently. What counts is the change of perspective. Once you think from experience, the boundaries between rooms start to shift. Often three rooms become one connected area with zones, as explained in the article Kitchen, dining, living: zones instead of rooms. And before any of that, someone has to ask you the right questions.

How we ask about your daily life

A life concept is born in conversation. We ask questions that at first seem to have little to do with interior design:

1. What does a typical morning look like, and who is where and when?
2. Who cooks, how often, and do you prefer to cook alone or together?
3. Where do you really eat, not just in theory?
4. How often do you have guests, and how many people sit at the table then?
5. Where and how do you unwind: reading, music, television, nothing?
6. Does anyone work from home regularly, and do they need quiet or just a place?
7. What annoys you about your home today, even if it is a small thing?
8. What should change over the next ten years: children, career, age, pets?

The seventh question is often the most revealing. Small daily annoyances, such as the missing socket by the bed, the drawer that never quite closes or the light that dazzles, tell us more about your needs than any stylistic wish. If you would like to arrive with a few thoughts, the article Preparing for the initial conversation lists what is worth bringing along.

From life concept to plan

Once your daily life has been described, the real planning begins. For the M. family it might go like this: the wall between kitchen and dining room opens up, and the kitchen gains an island where two people cook and three sit. The dining table moves up to the island and grows large enough for eight without an extension. If you often cook for guests, the article on the kitchen for hosts shows how to plan for exactly that.

The living room splits into two zones: one with a sofa and television, a smaller one with a reading armchair, a floor lamp and a bookcase. In the hallway we build a bespoke cloakroom, with one compartment per person and a small bench. In the bathroom the vanity unit widens to hold two basins. Our joinery workshop, Tischlerkultur, makes the built-ins itself, so each piece fits your wall to the millimetre. Typical solutions are shown on the pages for fitted wardrobes and fitted kitchens.

Light and materials follow the same logic. The dining table, where homework is done, needs glare-free, well-directed light. The reading corner needs something warm and focused. Between the zones you need transitions made by light, not by walls. The article on light as a transition between rooms explains how that works.

You cannot see that a life concept is a good one. You simply notice that the morning has become calmer.

What remains when life changes

A life concept describes a moment, but it plans for change. In three years' time the M. family's daughter will move out. What her room becomes should be thought through today. Perhaps a study, or a library with a reading chair in the window.

That is why we plan the fixed elements of a home to be durable and neutral enough to outlast several stages of life. Built-ins, floors and cabling are planned for decades. Furniture, textiles and colours may change more easily. How homes grow with a family is described in the article When the family grows. For the opposite case, when the house suddenly feels too big, read about the life stage after the children have moved out.

What does it cost to leave things as they are? Most people live with their floor plan the way they live with a squeaking door: they stop hearing it. Yet every day the same small frictions return. The search for keys, the queue at the washbasin, the guests squeezed into the kitchen. Each costs only a minute, and together they cost you the feeling of coming home to a place that is on your side. A new sofa in the old layout just moves the problem, and a built-in made without a plan can lock it in for twenty years.

Planning like this needs people who can listen and who also know how to build. With us both come together: Richard Dobrohruschka plans and curates, and the Viennese joinery workshop, founded in 1935 by Leopold Dobrohruschka, produces in its third generation. You have one contact person from the first sketch to the day of handover. You can find out who stands behind the studio on the page about our team.