If I understand correctly, the middle part of your drawing (foyer, hall, dining nook and kitchen) are all raised up and the outlying areas are all a step down. I would be tempted to run the wood on the raised area all the same direction, following what you have in the hallway and foyer through to the kitchen and nook. Then, in the step down areas, the wood would run at a 90 degree angle. It looks like that would truly orient towards the "long direction" of the nook and kitchen if this drawing is pretty well scaled, and would make the flow of the hall into kitchen seem more seamless and make it feel "bigger." That said, I did have the HWF in my own house make turns at the same level - I had an entry hall like you, and then another hall intersected it at a 90 degree angle in a T shape split and I had the wood meet abutted. We had a darker stain that unified the whole floor, so it didn't make it feel choppy or small. Just my two cents! Good luck, please post pics when you are done!

There are several things that must be considered. I like to use the concept of MOST amount of flooring that follows the general rule. If you have a single room (lets say 10' x 10' = 100sf) and then the REST of the space is much, much larger (say 600sf), you would want to try to keep the MAJORITY of the flooring (600sf) sticking to the rule of "longest length = long run of the room". The other question with hardwood becomes wooden subfloors. Sigh. Wooden subfloors over joists change the equation. Hardwood floors must be run perpendicular to the joists - no matter how big/small the rooms are. So...without knowing your set-up, without knowing your subfloor, without knowing the direction of sunlight, without knowing very much of anything about your situation...the majority of the home should follow the rule of thumb. Unless other factors contribute to changing this. Which I can't tell because there isn't enough information. And just for fun...diagonal is always an option = 15% waste and a more expensive labour bill.

The ONLY time a recommend that wood floors CHANGE DIRECTION is if the wood JOISTS change direction. If the joists are all running in the same direction, there is no need to change the direction. A *real wood flooring professional will try his/her DAMNEDEST to run everything in the same direction (whenever possible). So long as the structure of the home allows it, the wood can/should run in the same direction. A regular flooring 'guy' will change directions because it is easier on them...see where I'm going? If they need to change directions, the best/pretties option includes a decorative/inlay transition between the two floors. This is expensive AND difficult to achieve. A high-end wood flooring professional can and will offer decorative work. A regular flooring 'dude' will not. A quick discussion will tell us which type of professional you have hired.

Can you show us where the doors are on each wall. It is hard to visualize how you access each room. My guts feel right now is that if the laundry has its own room with a door closed and there is no way to walk directly from the leaving room to the hallway, I would put the wood floor the same direction as the hallway. I don't know the dimension of your hallway but you might end-up with many partial planks to fit the angles when you get close to the corners. I also believe that your brain might want to walk the direction the planks are laid out if the space is long and narrow. It think the brain would not have problem with a 0 or 90 or 45 degrees but it might have trouble to deal with other odd angles.