Twelve people in one house and it's raining on Thursday.
That's the real test of a floor plan. Not the listing photos, not the 3D tour — Thursday. Someone's making eggs, someone else is trying to nap on the couch fifteen feet away, and three kids are doing something loud near the stairs. That is the moment a floor plan either holds together or absolutely falls apart.
We think about this constantly when we're laying out a new build. The open concept has been the default answer in shore construction for a while now, and I understand why — it photographs well, it feels expansive when you're walking through on a dry Saturday, it reads as "modern." But I've also stood in enough of our finished projects during open-house weekends to know that buyers are starting to ask harder questions about it.
The Argument for Open, and Why It's Mostly Right
A buyer walked in last weekend and asked about the great room layout in a project we'd just finished — a four-bedroom reverse living plan on a 25-foot-wide lot in the low 40s blocks. She wanted to know if the kitchen being fully open to the living space was a dealbreaker for renters. The question that comes up a lot, actually, especially from families who've rented enough shore houses to know what goes wrong.
The honest answer: open concept wins on most days.
When you have a group of adults, the open plan keeps the cook in the conversation. Nobody's isolated. The sightlines to the deck matter — you can see the kids out back, you can hear when someone needs something, the whole floor breathes. For a shore house that's going to rent, that communal quality is real. Renters choose beach houses specifically because they want to be together. The layout should support that.
We also spec larger islands than we used to. Not decorative — functional. Seating for six at the island means the kitchen itself becomes a gathering point, which takes pressure off the dining table and lets meals stagger naturally when you've got a big group.
Counter depth on the refrigerator, concealed range hood where it makes sense for the ceiling height, cabinet hardware that doesn't feel precious — those things let the open plan work without the kitchen dominating visually when the house is sitting empty between rentals.
Where Open Plans Actually Break Down
Here's where I'll push back on myself: pure open concept with no acoustic separation is a problem in a shore rental, and we've gotten better at designing around it.
The bedroom question is obvious — bedrooms need doors, privacy, real walls. That's not the issue. The issue is the main living floor. When everything is one undifferentiated room, noise has nowhere to go. A 1,200-square-foot open floor has approximately zero acoustic buffering between the person watching TV at 10pm and the person trying to get a toddler to sleep in the room just off the living area.
We've started doing something on some projects that I'd describe as a soft separation — a partial wall, or a few feet of defined corridor, or a pocket door that can close off one zone from another without fragmenting the layout entirely. It's not a return to the closed-off rooms of a 50s-era cottage on a Sea Isle block, where the living room sat formally off the front door and the kitchen was a completely separate world in the back of the house. But it's also not pretending that a single open room is a neutral choice for every kind of group.
The rain day matters here. A shore house that can give teenagers their own corner of noise — or give the adults one — is a house that gets rented again.
(There's also the re-sale angle: we're seeing more buyers ask specifically about flex spaces, rooms that can be a bunk room or a den or a quiet sitting area depending on who's using it that week. A rigid open plan doesn't give you that.)
Defined spaces do photograph harder. I'll admit that. A room that isn't trying to be everything tends to look smaller in a 16mm lens shot than a fully open plan. That's a real tradeoff if your marketing depends heavily on listing photography, and most shore rentals do.
What We Actually Spec and Why
The projects we're most satisfied with right now split the difference. Open kitchen to dining, meaningful connection to outdoor living. But a defined space somewhere — a TV room that can be closed off, a bonus room upstairs, something that functions as a retreat when the main floor is in full family chaos mode.
If you're looking at the redevelopment math on a duplex conversion, floor plan flexibility is a real factor in what a unit can earn. A duplex where each unit has its own self-contained logic — not just a divided house, but two thoughtfully laid out spaces — performs differently than one that was carved up as an afterthought. The zoning question is always first, but the floor plan question is close behind it.
On single-family new builds, we're finding that the floor plan conversation connects directly to what the structure can support. If you're starting from an existing footprint — especially a pre-FIRM cottage that's dealing with the 50% rule on substantial improvements — your layout options aren't entirely free choices. What the structure can do, what the flood zone allows, what the lot size gives you: all of that shapes the floor plan before we've made a single finish decision.
The owners who come to us having already thought through these layers — block-by-block context, what the property can actually support structurally and by code, what the real income math looks like — those conversations move faster and end up somewhere better. For anyone trying to figure out whether a joint venture or an outright sale makes more sense for their specific property, the floor plan of what gets built is part of that calculation too.
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Twelve people, a week, and it's raining. The open plan that felt like freedom on move-in day starts to feel like one big room where there's no escaping anything.
What would you actually want that Thursday to feel like?
If you have a shore property and you're trying to figure out what it can become — structurally, financially, or both — reach out to Redfern Ocean Development. We evaluate most submissions within 48 hours.