Life After Fixed Rooms: The New Open Plan
Movable rooms and modular furniture in open-plan homes describe a design approach where partitions, furniture systems, and architectural details can be rearranged to redefine how space is used, allowing areas for living, working, and resting to expand, contract, and overlap throughout the day instead of being locked into traditional room boundaries.
The core shift is blunt: the future of open-plan living is not about knocking down walls, but about making every boundary optional. Traditional corridors and fixed rooms were built for a narrow idea of family life, yet our realities have splintered into hybrid schedules, shared households, pets underfoot and rising energy pressures. In that context, clinging to rigid plans has stopped being charming and started being wasteful. Designers experimenting with modular furniture open plan layouts and movable room dividers argue that space should respond to climate, intimacy and care, not to a century‑old diagram of bedrooms and hallways.
TAKK: Housing as Infrastructure for Coexistence
Barcelona- and New York-based studio TAKK, founded by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño, is one of the clearest voices saying that domestic architecture is not neutral. Their work treats the home as an "infrastructure for coexistence rather than a container of functions". That sounds abstract until you realise they are attacking the most sacred cow of housing: the one-activity-per-room rule. Instead of asking how many bedrooms you need, TAKK asks what relationships you want a home to make possible and which forms of care you are willing to keep visible.
This stance is more than theory. Luzárraga and Muiño’s curation of the Catalan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and their research project “100 Words for Water,” show how ecological thinking can rewrite both materials and social expectations. In practice, it leads to adaptive living spaces where comfort is "dynamic, localized and changing" rather than an air-conditioned constant. Privacy comes in gradients instead of solid doors, and parts of the home become more or less inhabitable depending on season, temperature or time of day. TAKK suggests the homes ahead will be more seasonal and connected to climate, not less comfortable.
CASA NM3: When Furniture Becomes Architecture
If TAKK rewrites the script, CASA NM3 shows the stage set. Presented at Via Carlo Farini 93 during Salone del Mobile, the project builds a domestic interior “without fixed walls,” using a system of movable partitions to outline four rooms without ever fully enclosing them. In other words, it is an open floor plan solution that refuses the usual chaos. Boundaries hold, but they are free to shift; the idea of the room becomes fluid as curtains and light structural frames redraw the plan on demand.
Here, modular furniture open plan thinking is pushed to its logical extreme. Within this framework, NM3’s objects “move beyond singular pieces and begin to operate as systems,” with NM25 and NM26 evolving into modular elements that extend into kitchens, desks and other components. Stainless steel, left untreated, sets a precise, almost clinical base, softened by textiles and personal objects that resist the blankness of a showroom. The designers put it plainly: a product becomes a system when specific details allow complete modularity, letting one logic generate many typologies. By using these pieces every day, they “gradually become an integral part of the home, of daily routines, and of one’s personal world”.
Psychological Rooms Without Visual Clutter
Both TAKK and NM3 show that flexible domestic design is as psychological as it is physical. Privacy no longer depends on a heavy door; it can be marked by a curtain track, a shift in floor material, or the orientation of a modular desk. The goal is to create adaptive living spaces that respect different degrees of intimacy without stuffing the plan with solid walls. As TAKK points out, privacy can exist “in gradients” and functions can overlap, with parts of a home switching in and out of use by time of day or season.
This subtlety matters. NM3 talks about working through subtraction and about objects that “fade into their surroundings” rather than shouting for attention. That restraint is not aesthetic snobbery; it is a clear argument against cluttered zoning. Movable room dividers, modular platforms and lightweight partitions become open floor plan solutions that mark territory in the mind more than in the structure, allowing a home office to disappear at dinner time or a guest room to shrink back into a reading corner. The message is blunt: architecture does not have to scream to be legible.
From Static Homes to Daily-Reconfigurable Living
The lesson from these projects is that the standard home, with its corridor spine and sealed-off rooms, was designed for a life that fewer and fewer people live. Families fragment and recombine, work drifts into bedrooms, pets become near-equal occupants, summers grow hotter, energy costs rise, and yet many homes arrive neatly segmented into old categories. That mismatch is making the typical open plan–versus–rooms debate feel dated. Life after rooms “does not necessarily mean a future without bedrooms or kitchens”; it means accepting that those boxes are “only one way of organizing domestic life, not its natural endpoint”.
Movable room dividers, modular furniture systems and adaptive layouts offer a more honest response. They keep the spaciousness people love about open plans while restoring the functional separation they miss, but on flexible terms. As NM3 notes, work gains consistency when it emerges from constraints rather than unfocused creativity; the same is true for homes. Constraints like climate, shared living and limited floor area are not annoyances to design around but prompts for better, more flexible domestic design. We should stop asking whether to choose open or closed plans, and start asking how often we want to redraw the lines.
