Family Home

A family home is a house planned around the shared life of a household: rooms where everyone comes together, rooms where each person can withdraw, and enough flexibility to change as children grow up, parents age and relatives arrive or leave. Designing one means balancing privacy and togetherness, fitting the plan to climate and site, and thinking about how the house will be used over decades rather than on the day it is finished.

What is a family home?

In architecture, the family home is less a building type than a brief. It can be a detached villa, a terrace, a flat inside a divided house, a backyard cottage or a three-generation compound. What unites them is the client: a group of people who share meals, money and routines but who are at different stages of life and need different things from the same rooms.

That sets the topic apart from the wider field of residential building, which also covers apartment blocks, hostels and housing estates designed for anonymous occupants. It also differs from a single plan type such as the courtyard house, although many family homes, especially in hot climates, are organised around a court. The questions here are about the household itself. Who needs to see whom from the kitchen? Where do teenagers or visiting grandparents get some distance? Which room becomes a study, a nursery or a carer's bedroom in fifteen years?

Good family homes answer those questions with spatial means rather than with more square metres: thresholds, screens, sightlines, a stair placed where it gathers people, a garden that works as an extra room. They also respond to their place, because a family home in the Mekong Delta and one in a London terrace face very different heat, light and street life.

A short history of the family home

Many traditions built houses for very large households. In Kerala, the nalukettu was the traditional homestead of the tharavadu, where many generations of a family lived together. Four halls, one on each side, are joined around a central courtyard open to the sky, the nadumuttam, and the arrangement let a large family live under one roof and share commonly owned facilities.

In the twentieth century, Kerala also became the base of the architect Laurie Baker, whose houses drew directly on local building logic. His own words, collected on his official website, explain the approach: he studied what local people had learned from climate and materials over centuries and applied those principles for each client.

"Sometimes, the local architecture is so beautiful and so apt that I feel it would be foolish and an affront to try and design in any other way."

Laurie Baker, quoted on the architect's official website

In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses reshaped the modest single-family house. The Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House of 1937 is often considered the first true Usonian. These houses tended to have open plans and a carport rather than a garage, were usually laid out as an L or a T, and showed little to the public street while their private rear sides opened widely to the garden. The Pope-Leighey House, built in 1940 and now open to the public, is one of the best-known examples.

More recently the household itself has changed again. Pew Research Center found that the number of people in the US living in multigenerational family households quadrupled between 1971 and 2021, reaching 59.7 million, or 18% of the population. The large shared house is returning, in new forms.

Key principles of family home design

A shared heart

Most family homes need one generous room, or a chain of rooms, where cooking, eating, homework and play overlap. The trick is to make it a real centre rather than a corridor with furniture in it.

"...the distribution of spaces synthesised into a large common living area, an intimate sleeping area and a "playground" dedicated not only to the children, but to the whole family."

Stefania Bulanga, project statement for 3 in 1

Privacy by degree

Closeness only works if withdrawal is possible. Instead of a hard split between public and private, the best plans grade the house from street to bedroom, using courts, screens and changes of level so that each generation can choose how much it sees of the others. Small homes need this too. In a 55 square metre flat in Le Havre laid out as a nineteenth-century enfilade, with rooms opening straight into one another, Atelier Orzan folded the doorways into built-in furniture rather than adding corridors that would cost the flat its continuity.

Turn the house to the garden

Where a family spends its day should get the best outdoor connection. Wright's Usonian houses closed to the street and opened to the back garden, and the idea still works for suburban lots. YES! Architects' O House in Pilar, Argentina, shows the street a 38 metre frontage that reads almost entirely as a blind wall, while its north side, the sunny side in the southern hemisphere, opens fully onto a garden of more than 2,500 square metres.

Answer the climate

Family homes are occupied all day, so passive comfort matters. Shade, cross-ventilation, deep verandahs and water near living spaces reduce reliance on machines and often give the house its character. NAQ Architecture's Vĩnh Long House in the Mekong Delta combines a perforated terracotta street screen, a skylit stair void and rooms lined up so air passes from front yard to backyard. HabitArt Architecture Studio's Saffron Verandah House in rural Tamil Nadu lets a mature mango orchard set the plan and the shade.

Plan for a lifetime of change

Children leave, parents move in, a home office becomes permanent. Rooms that can change use, a ground-floor bedroom, and a structure that allows a later extension or subdivision all add years to a house. Sometimes the change is a visitor rather than a resident: Solange Cálio Arquitetos planned the V+M House in São José do Rio Preto for a family's daily routine and for the frequent returns of the eldest daughter, who lives abroad.

Family homes on uni.xyz

The most liked project on the topic is DASEIN, Behind The Wall by Zeynep Özge Yalcin and Kardelen Türkoğlu, an entry to the Home Futura competition that received the People's Choice Award. Its statement starts from the idea that humanity has lost the meaning of home and sets out to search for it.

The Villa Vernacular - Kerala competition brought the nalukettu tradition into members' work. AALAY, the recreational abode by Rohit Chopade imagines a leisure home for a family of four set against the Alappuzha backwaters, mixing open, semi-open and enclosed spaces in a form that recalls traditional Kerala structures. In VILLA VERNACULAR KERALA, an Editor's Choice entry, a high fence and a heavy concrete front protect the household:

"The view might be overwhelming in its size and weight, whereas for the members of the household, gives a sense of protection and privacy from the outside world."

Jakub Gierszewski and Sara Butkiewicz, project statement for VILLA VERNACULAR KERALA

Treehouse mansion by Zuzanna Kowalska, Natalia Kot and Daria Górtatowska, another Editor's Choice entry, designs for a family moving to India for half a year, with working from home and a healthy work-life balance in mind.

The Nano Nest 2020 competition produced several houses about families under pressure. A HOUSE FOR LIFE by Tassos Petridis, a Runner-up, proposes a sustainable house in Amsterdam that supports a family for life with the feeling of a community within the family. The Home Kit by Asif Zeshan and Eftey Islam is a knock-down kit house for a lower-middle-income joint family of six, spanning three generations, in a dense tropical city. Buhay Bahay, The Alone Together House by Samantha Ong tells the story of a Filipino family looking for its own corner in a crowded world.

Our journals document built family homes. The House of Green Court by andblack design studio in Ahmedabad is a three-generation home organised around a planted, skylit court, where brick, ceramic block and terracotta screens let the family manage privacy by degree with very few doors.

In Danville, California, Austin Sandy Architects' Paraiso Remodel reworks a dark, chopped-up ranch house for a young family, moving the connection to the garden from the primary bedroom to the rooms where the household spends its day. In Los Angeles, Granada Form's white stucco accessory dwelling unit fits a two-bedroom family home over three levels, counting the roof, into a backyard lot.

Challenges and future directions

The biggest pressure on family homes is cost. In dense cities, families are squeezed into flats planned for smaller households, and the extra room for a grandparent or a home office is the first thing cut. Kit, modular and incremental houses, which a family can extend as money allows, are one answer.

Households are also changing faster than buildings. Two of our journals show the range. Studio Andre Lenza's Jabuticabeiras House in Goiânia is a deliberate downsizing for a couple whose children have left, on a lot in the same neighbourhood as their children and grandchildren. Atempo Arquitectura's Sabina I House in Cuenca, Ecuador turns an existing family home into a 415 square metre residential complex. Designing for that kind of later conversion from the start, with structure, services and entrances that allow a house to split or merge, is still rare.

Climate adds a third challenge. A family home occupied all day and all year needs to stay comfortable as summers get hotter, ideally without air conditioning in every room. Vernacular strategies such as courts, screens, shade and cross-ventilation are moving from heritage interest back into mainstream practice.

Family homes for students and designers

The family home is a classic first studio project, but it rewards a sharper brief. Pick a real household, ideally one with three generations, and map a week of its routines before drawing. Design the same house at three moments, ten years apart. Study a regional type such as the nalukettu and test what its plan does for privacy and climate, then reinterpret it for a smaller plot. Or take an existing house in your own city and redesign it for the household that lives there now, which is the brief most practising architects actually receive. Related reading on uni.xyz includes multigenerational living, Kerala architecture and flexible living. For live briefs on houses and housing, browse design competitions on uni.xyz.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a house a good family home?

A good family home has a shared centre where the household naturally gathers, private rooms where each person can withdraw, and a strong link to outdoor space. It also adapts: rooms can change use as children grow and needs shift.

What is a multigenerational home?

A multigenerational home houses two or more adult generations, often grandparents, parents and children. Design usually gives each generation its own private zone, sometimes with a separate entrance or small kitchen, around shared living space.

Is an open plan good for families?

An open plan makes supervision and shared activity easy, which suits families with young children. It needs balancing with quieter, enclosable rooms for study, work and rest, or the whole house becomes one noisy space.

What is a traditional Kerala family house called?

The traditional Kerala homestead for a large joint family is the nalukettu, four halls arranged around an open central courtyard called the nadumuttam. More elaborate forms, such as the ettukettu with two courtyards and the pathinarukettu with four, served even larger households.

How can a family home be designed to change over time?

Use a simple structure with few internal load-bearing walls, put at least one bedroom and a bathroom on the entry level, and plan where a future extension or second dwelling could go on the plot.

References and further reading

• Nalukettu, Wikipedia
• Laurie Baker: Quotes, Laurie Baker official website
• Usonia, Wikipedia
• Pope-Leighey House, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
• Financial issues top the list of reasons U.S. adults live in multigenerational homes, Pew Research Center