Apartment layout: how a floor plan takes shape

What a layout is, in short

A layout is not a drawing “for looks” and not the same thing as the plan in a developer's brochure. It's a document: a floor plan of the apartment with zoning, furniture and equipment placement, tied to the actual measurements of the property rather than a standard floor template. In the studio's practice this service is called “Space-planning project” and it answers one specific question: how to lay out functions across the floor area so that the apartment is comfortable to live in for this particular family, not an abstract buyer.

It's important not to confuse an apartment layout with area planning: that's an urban-planning term about developing a block or district, unrelated to interior design. A layout is always about one specific property: an apartment, a house, a unit.

Where a layout begins: measurements and the technical brief

A layout doesn't come from nowhere: it starts with measurements. The designer visits the property, takes exact dimensions, records the position of windows, door openings, risers and ventilation ducts, and takes photographs. Next comes an analysis of the building services: where the utilities run, what can be moved, and what's fixed by the building's structure. Only after that does functional zoning begin, dividing the space into zones based on the facts, not a template.

In a full-cycle interior design project, these steps are part of the technical brief stage and take around two weeks, while the layout itself, together with visualisation, takes from 20 working days for a property of around 100 m². If the layout is ordered as a stand-alone service, without visualisation or technical documentation, the path from measurements to an approved scheme is shorter: the studio works only with the logic of the space, without producing the full set of construction documents.

How layout options come together: zoning and lifestyle scenarios

There is never just one good layout; there are always several. The studio's working standard is two or three zoning options per apartment, each with its own logic: where the private zone sits, where the shared one does, how storage is organised, what happens with pass-through rooms. The client sees the alternatives and chooses the final layout knowingly, rather than agreeing to the only solution on the table.

This approach shows most clearly not in a single apartment but across a whole building, in a project for the developer Brusnika. For eight open-plan apartments with an average floor area of 139.5 m², the studio developed two layout options for each. Every option came with a card describing how the family would live: how storage was organised, where the master bedroom sat, whether the kitchen worked as an island in the shared zone, whether a separate staff room was needed. This shows what a space-planning solution really is more precisely than any definition: not furniture arranged “for looks”, but a specific way of living in which every square metre is given a function.

Ergonomics and furniture placement

A layout only becomes workable when it accounts for real ergonomics, not just the general proportions of the rooms. One of the common mistakes of people who try to plan a space on their own is underestimating dimensions and heights: there isn't room to walk past the sofa, the plumbing outlet ends up in the wrong place, storage is worked out “by eye”, without reference to a specific family's belongings. In a layout these parameters are fixed at the drawing stage, before the renovation begins, not after the fact, when redoing the work is expensive.

Building services are a separate challenge. Ventilation, air conditioning and humidification need to be concealed and tied in with the zoning at this stage already: if they're forgotten during the layout, the approved scheme almost always has to be changed at the technical documentation stage.

What gets fixed in numbers: passage widths, heights and clearances

Some ergonomic parameters are set as fixed values at the layout stage, rather than checked after the fact:

• Passage widths. The gap between furniture and a wall should let one person pass without turning sideways. The exact margin depends on the situation: a spot where you have to squeeze past someone seated at a table needs more room than a corridor between rooms. These gaps mean different things, and the layout does not reduce them to a single figure.
• Door and cabinet-front swing zones. In front of a hinged door, a wardrobe door or an oven, there should be room for the full swing of the panel plus a person's step. One of the typical mistakes of self-planned layouts is that open panels “don't get in the way” on the drawing, but on site they collide with each other or with furniture.
• Worktop and fixture heights. Here the studio works to set benchmarks, applied as early as the family questionnaire: a kitchen worktop at 900 mm (the formula is bent-elbow height minus 10–15 cm), a bathroom basin at 850 mm, a desk at 750 mm, a WC at 400 mm from the floor, a rain shower head at 2100–2200 mm, which is 200–300 mm above the head of the tallest member of the family. These are standard values; if someone in the household is noticeably taller or shorter than average, the height is adjusted for that person.
• The dining table and the bed. Around the table there should be enough room to push a chair back and pass behind a seated person, and around the bed, enough to make it up and reach it from both sides if that is how the family lives. The studio works out the exact clearance for the specific furniture and the specific room rather than taking it from a general table: in practice, a table in an 8 m² kitchen and a table in a separate dining room need different margins.

These figures aren't checked by eye: the furniture layout is a drawing with the real dimensions of specific models, not abstract rectangles.

Layouts built around a kitchen-living room: what's different

In apartments planned around a kitchen-living room, the kitchen is combined with the living room into one spacious shared zone, and the bedrooms are placed in a private block, with no through-passage across the shared room. This is a specific case of the same functional-zoning logic applied to any property: dividing the space into a shared scenario (guests, cooking, relaxing together) and a private one (sleep, work, personal time).

The same principle, a shared zone combined with a kitchen island, is also visible in the layouts from the Brusnika project mentioned above: one of the lifestyle-scenario cards there is built specifically around a kitchen island in the shared space, rather than a kitchen closed off behind a door. The difference between a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen-living room and a conventional two-room apartment with a separate kitchen isn't in the floor area, but in how the rooms' roles are distributed: fewer separate rooms, more of one large shared space.

A detailed breakdown of zoning the kitchen-living room, arranging the bedrooms, and keeping cooking smells out of the living area is set out in a separate article on planning a kitchen-living-room apartment for a family with a child.

When reconfiguration is needed and what it requires

If the new layout affects load-bearing structures, such changes are officially classed as reconfiguration; moving “wet points” such as the bathroom and the kitchen, along with building services, is usually treated by housing regulations as a separate category of alteration. Both normally require approval from the relevant authorities. This is a separate legal process that isn't part of either space planning or the full interior design project: the studio develops the technical basis of the layout, while formal approval of the alterations or reconfiguration is a separate step, carried out in parallel or independently.

If the new layout doesn't touch load-bearing walls, building services or wet points, and only redistributes furniture within the existing services, separate approval is usually not required. Moving even lightweight partitions changes the internal layout, however, and may also be subject to approval under local housing rules. An exact answer for a specific apartment can only come from a review of the measured survey, not a general rule.

Space-planning project or a full design project: which to choose

If the goal is to work out quickly how to organise the space and reach a decision, before buying an apartment, say, or at the start of a renovation, a space-planning project is enough: zoning and furniture layout only, without visualisation or documentation for the builders. If you then need the full path through to completion, a 3D visualisation showing the future interior and technical documentation with drawings and specifications for the crew, that is already a full interior design project. All its modules and stages are covered in the article “Interior design project: a full breakdown”.

A layout for an apartment can be ordered as a stand-alone service or as the first stage of a full project. A space-planning project for an apartment is tailored to the specific property and the family's way of life, not to a standard floor template.