The kitchen seems a bit chopped up.

It’s a bit of a maze getting from the garage to the kitchen. I’d address that first.

I don’t care much for the tunnel entry to the dining room. It’s going to be very dark and it’s very narrow. This looks like a grand house - double doors would be more appropriate.

It appears it’s going to take a lot of walking around time to cook in that kitchen. Plus traffic patterns passing through key work areas.

Where will you spend most of your waking hours in the house?

Not sure how much you can change right now, but I would like the kitchen door to the family room closed off and make the kitchen counter an L.

For the entry from the garage, that is problematic. First of all, the closet door opens in the wrong direction. Hinge it on the other side. Better yet, move it down towards the exterior wall. If that is a bench and hooks opposite the garage door, what is the mudroom for? Don’t make it so hard to get to.

thanks all this is helpful. Mark - likely on the back stretch of the house - between family room, kitchen and keeping room

I would switch the dining and living rooms. right now everyone will be waking through the butlers pantry to get to the dining room. that path is usually reserved for the cook. plus you are putting all of your traffic through the kitchen work zones. I agree with @bpath that the kitchen should either change to an L, or if you move the dining room, you can make that space the butlers pantry.
Long dark hall upstairs.

Maybe flip the pantry and the beverage area. Then you could put a pass through into the pantry which may help with unloading groceries.

Random thoughts:

- The perimeter is full of jigs and jobs, which will drive up the price and add nothing to the liveability.

- Downstairs guest room is great. Its one negative: no easy access to the laundry room. Not a problem if it stays a guest room, but if it's ever a family bedroom, problem.

- Dining room is a lot of steps from the kitchen. Think of how many steps would be required to set up a meal /return things to the kitchen. Flip-flopping the dining room and the keeping room, mentioned by someone above, is a great idea.

- Love the pantry, but it's not convenient to the garage entry. Flip-flop it and the beverage center, and it'll be much more convenient. Maybe go with a walk-through pantry with doors on both sides ... that would make it accessible from both sides.

- The beverage center would be much better if it were more easily accessible to your living areas.

- Hate the kitchen. It's too big for convenience, too choppy.

- The two living areas are nice. I like that the staircase opens to one ... it'll be so nice at Christmas with lights and greenery ... be sure to place an outlet in an appropriate place.

- You have a lot of bathrooms -- you're going to spend your life cleaning toilets. The THREE secondary bedroom bathrooms all lack storage ... no space for a hamper, towel storage.

- Upstairs that's one looooong dark hallway.

- I'd like to see a set of double pocket doors between the exercise room and rec room. This would allow for flexibility, if you ever use those rooms for other purposes.

- Hate the master bath. Too overblown, toilet in dark closet, and not even a tub.

- Look at the pathway you'd have to take to reach the master closet. As big as it is, consider opening a second door between the master bedroom and the closet ... it'll save steps when you just want to put away your shoes, or you just want to get a sweater.

Thanks everyone - I wish I would have stumbled on this forum earlier in the process - darn! I like the L-shaped kitchen idea that some suggested. My only concern with that is you would be shutting out all the light from the living room windows - would it be too dark? I guess there are always tradeoffs and a more functional kitchen might outweigh natural light. Regarding the comment about all the bathrooms - I agree, we wouldn't have put all those in but what we've learned is you have to keep up with market expectations if you ever want to resell it. People expect en suite bathrooms apparently. I guess you don't have to clean them as often if they don't get as much use. Lots of food for thought here - thank you again.

How does the home relate to the site? Do you have elevations (please tell me yes they are almost finished as well)? Have you priced the roof, as Mrs. Pete says this will be large and expensive.

Hard to answer because we don't have a site plan yet. Here are the elevations - we are restricted in style a bit by neighborhood covenants (existing homes are fairly traditional) but were trying to go for clean lines and unfussy materials. I think the plan is to do 10" exposure siding to make it look a bit more contemporary.

I'd make some changes to the mudroom and garage entrance area so that one walks directly into the mudroom from the garage. Instead of dragging the elements into the hall you have it isolated in the mudroom. It seems kind of pointless to have a mudroom and then what appears to be some type of built-in across from the garage door.

The washer and dryer back-up against a bedroom. Could be noisy if doing late-night laundry.

I wish I would have stumbled on this forum earlier in the process

If you've not started digging, then it's never too late to start fresh. It's better to go through the hassle now instead of having regrets later.

Tell us the climate or location and post a roof pan.

I still can't read the plan very well.

The house is in architectural limbo. Updated vernacular can be great but something this big should make a stronger statement or at least more attrition to detail.

Depending on your geographic location, I would be concerned about all your west facing windows. Unless you have a lot of trees, you may find that you have to cover those windows for most of the afternoon with heavy drapes to make your living space bearable in summer. Our west exposure is so bad that this is literally the very first thing I examine about every house plan I look at. Oh, and in most of the US, west is the direction most storms blow in from, so wind, rain, snow and hail will beat on from that direction too.

Without knowing the location all I can say is the kitchen looks like an afterthought when it should be the starting point.

We are in North Carolina. The lot backs up to woods.

I'm glad you've got woods, that may help, although if you clear enough for a pool, it may still be a bit of a problem. So many home designs stretch the living space across the back of the home, regardless of the orientation of the lot. South facing is in general very nice at providing light and warmth in winter but not in summer, so even flipping your plan so the garage is on the north and the side windows of the living room are south might be nice. If you should decide to pursue major modifications, here's a favorite online plan just to serve as an example of how you can get southern exposure even on an east facing lot. The plan probably won't meet your needs, but does show what is possible.
https://architecturalhouseplans.com/product/simple-passive-solar-craftsman/

There are two trains of thought in locating a laundry room. Either locate it where the items to be washed are generated, or locate it where someone is located the majority of the day for convenient changing of the load. Usually it means the clothes have to be hauled a long distance, or someone has to make the long trek to the laundry room every time the bell rings (could have a Pavlovian effect). Sometimes it is a conundrum.

Not a pro . . . it looks like you'll have to walk through the bathroom to enter the master closet. Can you reconfigure things so the closet has a separate entrance? It would really make the space more efficient for two people to use simultaneously.

Also, given your small family size and the fact that you'll have two living areas on the main floor and four bedrooms, do you really need separate rec and exercise rooms upstairs? Will different people be using those rooms concurrently very often? I'd consider removing the wall between the rooms to provide greater flexibility as needs change over time. Good luck with your build!

Your plan actually looks like an early version of our custom home plan. If you'd like to see the final of what we ended up with to give you some ideas, message me.

Thanks anj_p and I appreciate your suggestion about switching dining room with keeping room. The one issue I see with it is the keeping room is prime real estate in the house (overlooking pool, etc) and I would hate to tie it up with dining room table versus comfortable seating. Also I don’t love dining rooms opening to kitchens - it feels too chaotic for me.

my suggestion was actually to switch the living room/tv room with the dining room. a TV room is better off isolated due to sound, and views don't matter.

I do not want to offend you, and am commenting because you asked for feedback. I can imagine how excited you are to be building a new home as you should be. I identified a fairly extensive list of issues I found with the layout and after spending some time to provide potential solutions, kept coming up short. I tried to stay within the footprint and read the other comments to glean your requirements/ preferences. Ultimately, I was unable to address even one item successfully without compromising some other area. Typically when that happens, my solution is to start from scratch - new , but I don’t know that it’s an option for you at this point. If there are other plans being offered that you might be able to switch to, please post.

Here are just a few things that struck me immediately:

• a “foyer” being 7’-8” W is fine,
  but a 20’ hallway that wide in a house this size is simply wasted SF. Hallways are “circulation space”- function as pass thru’s, do not function as living area. over 100sf of wasted space in front hall. also from front door, look down very wide, long hallway to off-center window in family room.

• the floating kitchen. your kitchen is an island with appliances randomly sprinkled around the perimeter.

• to get from the pool to your bedroom to shower/change into dry clothes is through the keeping room and kitchen. to just use powder room you still have to walk soaking wet through the keeping room.

• you look from the keeping room unobstructed into the mudroom

• to get groceries into pantry have to carry them into house and either drop them and go into mudroom to kick off coat, shoes or wear everything and walk through keeping room, and kitchen.

-fridge and bvg fridge far from back door which on hot summer pool days, will mean constant traffic through kitchen.

-DR is fairly large sized- and it will be one of the least used spaces. Another ?? re: allocation of SF; as is double height foyer.

There are more, but my point really is, this is a very poorly laid out floor plan and you are paying for lots of wasted and unusable space and space that isn’t going to function well.

Thanks for all the observations Adalisa, and yes, unfortunately we're not at a point where we can scrap it and start over. Some of the tweaks we can make but the rest of it will have to be a learning experience...for the next time we build a custom house - ha. Regarding a couple of your points:

-the large dining room was at our request. We enjoy entertaining and have a lot of family in the area. I wanted a generous space so people didn't feel tight (a fault of our current house)

-there is actually direct access to the powder from outside (porch door)

- I'm curious about the kitchen - several people have mentioned it. Don't most kitchens with center islands have "appliances randomly sprinkled around the perimeter"? We've been through a couple gut kitchen remodels ourselves so are not unfamiliar with what works and what doesn't. We got the one suggestion of closing off the door and making the perimeter on L but I'm curious about other suggestions.

Thanks again!

Most cooks can make the best of any kitchen. Some kitchen designs can make a cook feel like a chef, and some kitchen designs can make a cook feel like a slave. Kitchens should be designed to accommodate the way the cook cooks. Did the person that laid out our kitchen talk to you about how you cook and what you cook? In my view your kitchen should be labeled "EXERCISE".

gotta get those steps in somehow! Yes we contemplated the distance between sink and range for a while and thought maybe we could add a prep sink in island. We decided we’d rather have an uncluttered island and take the 2 extra steps to existing sink. We tend to spread out and like lots of room when cooking. Our kitchen 2 houses ago had a long stretch between refrigerator and stove and we did not find it overly cumbersome.

Forgive me if someone has already mentioned this: I highly recommend you increase the depth of your terrace to at least the far edge of the grill pad before the wood steps start. It'll not only make it a more useful space than the current 4' depth allows, but the grill master won't have to go down two steps in order to turn right and hop up onto the pad where the grill is.