After Years of Open-Plan Living, How Has Covid Affected Floor Layouts?

Though some luxury buyers will always prefer a formal dining room or a classic six, loft-like open-floor plans have been trending for years, with kitchen and dining room walls being torn down in service of spacious great rooms that connote a more casual style of living and entertaining. But as with so many other aspects of day-to-day life, the way people use their homes has changed dramatically since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Dining rooms became home schools, or sometimes prep areas for cooking at home,” said Nikki Field, founder of The Field Team at Sotheby’s International Realty in New York City. “There was a lot of adapting spaces in order to [accommodate] this group [family] effort that was going on for almost a year.”

As such, many buyers now have highly specific needs in mind when it comes to the floor plan and flexibility of a home.

“One of the things that has really changed is how involved buyers are in the floor plan even before they’ve seen the apartment,” said Stan Ponte of Sotheby’s International Realty in New York City. “We’ve had many examples where a client, before making an appointment, will reach out directly and already have scanned the floor plan, and have circles on walls, ‘X’s in certain places, asking if this wall can be broken down, can we put pocket doors here, expand this room, contract that room.”

In addition to sheer square footage, additional rooms—as well as the option to divide larger spaces up at a moment’s notice—are now essential features on many buyers’ lists.

“Overall, floor plans have become more important than ever before,” said Bianca D’Alessio of NestSeekers International in New York City. “Kitchen and kitchen storage have become way more important. People want space, generous layouts, room for a king or queen size bed in all bedrooms, and a home office in addition to that. That changes the dimensions of bedrooms.”

As the real estate market navigates the stop-and-start reopening and the prospect of another long stretch of working and schooling from home, here’s what the future of the floor plan might look like.

‘Extra’ Rooms Are Now Essential

The resounding housing trend to come out of the pandemic was the sense that “bigger is better,” and whatever a buyer’s preferred layout, extra rooms are now at the top of their wish list.

“In my experience, the vast majority of buyers do [still] prefer the open floor plan, because we’re all living much more casually,” said Nicole Hechter, a New York City-based Corcoran agent. “However there has been a real trend towards needing at bare minimum a home office or extra bedroom—for people working from home with kids doing homework at home it’s critical. So where we used to have people looking for a three-bedroom, they now need a three-bedroom plus a home office or fourth bedroom.”

In many cases, Ms. Hechter said the extra bedroom “wasn’t going to be a bedroom, it would be an office, room for a Peloton, a room for people to go and make their phone calls or just decompress from being with everyone.” Some affluent families have also sought apartments with extra room for live-in nannies and baby nurses, Ms. Field said, preferring that they not have to commute on public transportation in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.

“I think multi-purposes rooms are the way to go,” said Angela Kessel, an agent with Houlihan Lawrence in Westchester, New York. “I represent a lot of builders and advise on new construction, and that’s what we’re doing. They’re still doing the center great room and open kitchen, but have these dedicated spaces that serve many functions.”

Ms. Hechter added, “I think many people still want that great room where everyone can be together, but there is also a longing for privacy.”

Keep the Open Plan, But Make It Flexible

While there will always be exceptions to the rule, for American luxury buyers, the pandemic largely hasn’t dampened the craze for an expansive open entertaining space.

“What we’ve seen coming out of Covid is that clearly some division of space and rooms is required,” Ms. Kessel said. “However, the open-concept kitchen, great room and family room is here to stay. People still want the open family room to entertain in and to be able to watch the kids while they’re in the kitchen.”

In certain properties, an open-plan design may even be integral to the building’s overall appeal. “Where we’re building here [in Sarasota, Florida] tends to be in areas that are near the water and very view-centric,” said Dan Kaplan, managing partner at developer PMG. “So having an open floor plan accentuates those external features. Specifically where we’re building, we haven’t thought to change our floor plans or how the buildings necessarily function.”

Instead, the potential to make those shared spaces adaptable has become a selling point for some properties.

At The Woolworth Tower Residences, Pavilion A—a $23.3 million five-bedroom listing in Manhattan that was featured on the most recent season of HBO’s “Succession”—Mr. Ponte said, “It’s a great floor plan because we pre-designed it so that the open kitchen could easily accommodate pocket doors or folding doors to separate it from the great room.”

“That’s been a real key for buyers, to be able to know that if they’re cooking dinner and on a Zoom and the kids are in the living room, they can just shut the door for 20 minutes,” Mr. Ponte added. “People rarely sit at desktops.”

At 555 West End Ave., a new development in New York City, “We have 13-foot ceilings in the apartments, so it’s very big and loft-like, but the kitchen is also closed off,” said Alexa Lambert, a New York City-based agent with Compass. “If you look at the floor plans they’re like open kitchens but with pocket doors that can close—it’s the best of both worlds. People are looking for bigger, sunny spaces so that they don’t feel claustrophobic, and they’re also looking for little nooks and private areas. They want both.”

Particularly as the Omicron variant surges in the U.S., sending many businesses and schools back to exclusively remote setups, the push toward flexibility—and the ability to have every possible option contained within one home—is likely to continue.

“It’s an interesting mix of uncertainty for buyers of all ages on how they want to live their lifestyle right now,” Ms. Field said. “Are they going back to the office? Do they still have to maintain a home professional space? Because we are in such an unknown moment regarding the pandemic, I think people are looking for flexibility to be able to pivot if we need to.”

Read the news, and it won’t take long to find a story about the latest feat of artificial intelligence. AI passed the bar exam! It can help diagnose cancer! It “painted” a portrait that sold at Sotheby’s for $1 million!

My own great hope for AI: that it might simplify the everyday problem of meal planning.

Seem a bit unambitious? Think again. For more than two decades as a food writer, I’ve watched families struggle to get weeknight meals on the table. One big obstacle is putting in the upfront time to devise a variety of easy meals that fit both budget and lifestyle.

Meal planning poses surprisingly complex challenges. Stop for a minute and consider what you’re actually doing when you compile a weekly grocery list. Your brain is simultaneously calculating how many people are eating, the types of foods they enjoy, ingredient preferences (and intolerances), your budget, the time available to cook and so on. No wonder so many weeknights end with mediocre takeout.

Countless approaches have tried to “disrupt” the meal-plan slog: books, magazines, apps, the once-vaunted meal kits, which even delivered the ingredients right to your door. But none could offer truly personalized plans. Could AI succeed where others failed?

The Weird Old Days

I conducted my first tests of AI in the summer of 2023, with mixed results. Early versions of Open AI’s ChatGPT produced some usable recipes. (I still occasionally make its gingery pork in lettuce wraps.) But the shopping lists it created were sometimes missing an ingredient or two. Bots! They’re just like us!

Eager to please, the chatbot also made some comical culinary suggestions. After I mentioned I had a blender, it determinedly steered me to use the blender…for everything, including fried rice, which it recommended I whiz into a kind of gruel. While it provided a competent recipe for pasta with zucchini, thyme and lemon, it thought it would be brilliant to add marshmallows, which I’d mentioned I had in my pantry, to the sauce. As a friend said: “If you’re having AI plan the recipes for you, it should definitely be doing something better than what your stoned friend would make you at two in the morning.”

Early AI could plan meals for the week, but required a lot of hand-holding. Like an overconfident intern.

More Fully Baked

Eighteen months after those first attempts—about 1,000 years in AI time—I was ready to try again. In January, DeepSeek AI, a Chinese chatbot, grabbed headlines around the world for its capabilities and speed (and potential security risks). There were also new and improved versions of the chatbots I’d found wanting.

This time, I decided to experiment with ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek. (To see how they compared to one another, see “Bytes to Bites,” below.)

From my first AI rodeo, I knew to use short, direct sentences and get very specific about what I wanted. “Think like an experienced family recipe developer,” I told DeepSeek. “Create a week’s worth of dinners for a family of four. At least three meals should be vegetarian. One person doesn’t like fresh tomatoes. We like Italian, Japanese and Mexican cuisine. All meals should be cooked within 60 minutes.”

For the next 24 seconds, the chatbot “reasoned” through my request, spelling out concerns as I watched, rapt: Would the person who doesn’t like fresh tomatoes eat marinara sauce? Black bean and sweet potato tacos are a nice vegetarian entree, but opt for salsa verde to avoid tomatoes. Lemony chicken piccata is fast, but serve with broccolini. It was…amazing. The consolidated shopping list the chatbot provided was error free.

I tried the same prompt with Claude and ChatGPT, with curiously similar results. With all the options in the world, both bots suggested black bean and sweet potato tacos, and chicken piccata. The recipes’ instructions varied, as did suggested side dishes.

Relationship Counselling

I decided to write a more detailed request. “Long prompts are good prompts,” said Dan Priest, chief AI officer for consulting firm PwC in the U.S. The more information you provide, the more the AI can “align with your expectations.” Don’t try to get everything right the first time, Priest said: “Have a conversation.”

Good advice. I admit, when I first began my tests, I was searching for weak spots. But I learned it’s crucial to refine requests. As Priest said, AI will consider your various demands and make trade-offs—though perhaps not the ones you’d make.

So I started talking to AI. I said I like to cook with seasonal ingredients—that my dream dinner is a night at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant where chef Alice Waters redefined rustic-French cooking as California cuisine. Within seconds I had gorgeous recipes for spring lamb chops with fresh herbs, and miso-glazed cod with spring onions and soba. When I asked to limit the budget to $200, the bot swapped in pork for pricey lamb and haddock for cod. I requested meals that adhered to guidelines from the American Heart Association, and recipes that used only what was in my fridge. No problem.

But would the recipes work? Chatbots don’t have experience cooking; they are Large Language Models trained to predict what word should follow the last. As any cook knows, a recipe that reads well can still end in disaster. To my surprise, the recipes I tested worked exactly as written by the chatbots—and took no longer than advertised. Even my luddite husband called Claude’s rigatoni with butternut squash, kale and brown butter “a keeper.”

As yet no chatbot can compete with Alice Waters—or my husband, for that matter—in the kitchen. (For more on that, see “How Do Real Cooks Rate AI?” below.) But I’ll keep asking AI to, say, create shopping lists for recipes I upload, or come up with a recipe for what I happen to have in the refrigerator—as long as I’m there to whisper in the chatbot’s ear.

Bytes to Bites

Which chatbot is right for your kitchen?

Any of the three chatbots we tested can deliver a working meal plan—if you know how to talk to it. My personal pick was Anthropic’s Claude, for its intelligent tone and creativity, followed by DeepSeek AI for its “reasoning.” AI “agents” such as Open AI’s Operator, can, in theory, order the food needed to cook your recipes, but the consensus is they need a bit more time to develop.

Open AI’s ChatGPT • I had quibbles with ChatGPT’s first round of recipes. The seasoning skewed bland—only one tablespoon of soy sauce for a large veggie stir fry. It had me start by sautéing my chicken piccata, which then got cold while the pasta cooked. ChatGPT was also annoyingly chipper in its interactions. Still, with a few requested revisions, its lemon and pea risotto was perfection.

DeepSeek AI • I was impressed with this chatbot’s “reasoning” and the way it balanced sometimes-conflicting requests. Its recipes were seasonal (without prompting) and easy to follow; its shopping list, error free. Its one unforgivable mistake: presuming a paltry number of stuffed pasta shells would feed my hungry family. Some have voiced security concerns over using a Chinese chatbot; I felt comfortable sharing my meal preferences with it.

Anthropic’s Claude • I felt like Claude “got” me. This encouraged me to chat with it, resulting in recipes I liked and that worked, like a Mexican pozole for winter nights. This bot does need prompting; its initial instructions for brown butter and crispy sage leaves would have flummoxed an inexperienced cook. But when I suggested it offer step-by-step instructions, it praised me, which made me think it was even smarter.

Try This at Home

Have a conversation. Even a very specific meal-planning prompt requires AI to make assumptions and choices you might oppose. Ask it to revise. Add additional requirements. Follow up for more specific instructions. Time spent up front will deliver a more successful plan.

Role-play. Ask AI to think like a cook whose food you enjoy. (Told I like writer Tamar Adler’s recipes, Claude instantly offered one for wild mushroom bread pudding.) If you aren’t a skilled cook, it’s probably unwise to ask AI to mimic a three-star chef. Instead, ask it to simplify recipes inspired by your idol.

Read carefully and use common sense. It is always important to read through a recipe before you shop or set up in the kitchen, and this is especially true with AI. Recipes are invented on the fly and not tested. Ask for clarification if necessary, or a rewrite based on your skills, equipment or time.

Ask for a consolidated shopping list. In seconds, AI can aggregate the ingredients for your recipes into a single grocery list. Ask for total pounds or number of packages needed. (This saves you having to figure out, for example, how many red peppers to buy for 2 cups diced.)

Request cook times and visual cues. A good recipe writer lets you know how things will look or feel as they cook. Ask AI for the same. This will improve a vague “Bake for 20 minutes” to “bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown and the cake springs back to the touch.”

How Do Real Cooks Rate AI?

We asked AI to create dishes in the style of three favourite cooks, which it does base on text from the Internet and elsewhere it’s been trained on. And then we asked the cooks to judge the results. Verdict: The recipes didn’t reflect our panel’s expertise or attention to detail. Seems AI can’t replace them—yet.

Tamar Adler undefined Trained to cook at seminal restaurants including Prune and Chez Panisse; food writer, cookbook author, podcaster

AI dishes inspired by Tamar: Winter Squash and Wild Mushroom Bread Pudding; Braised Lamb Shoulder With White Beans and Winter Herbs; Pan-Roasted Cod With Leeks and Potatoes

Assessment: “Superficially, the recipes seem great and like recipes I would write.”

Critiques: “So much of everything I’ve written has been geared toward helping cooks build community and capability. Here, a cook is neither digging in and learning by trying and failing and repeating and growing; nor are they talking to another person, exchanging advice, smiles, jokes, ideas, updates.”

GRADE: C

Nik Sharma undefined Molecular biologist turned chef; editor in residence, America’s Test Kitchen; cookbook author

AI dishes inspired by Nik: Black Pepper and Lime Dal With Crispy Shallots; Roasted Spring Chicken With Black Cardamom and Orange; Roasted Winter Squash and Root Vegetables With Maple-Miso Glaze

Assessment: “A bit creepy. It’s trying too hard to imitate me but leaving out my intuition and propensity to experiment.”

Critiques: “Ingredients are not listed in order of use, and quantities and cook times are off. Black cardamom would kill that chicken. Also: I always list volumes for liquids and weights, whenever possible.” (AI did not—but you could ask it to!)

GRADE: C

Andrea Nguyen undefined Leading expert on the cuisine of Vietnam, cookbook author, cooking teacher, creator of Viet World Kitchen

AI dishes inspired by Andrea: Quick Lemongrass Chicken Bowl; Winter Vegetable Banh Mi With Spicy Mayo; Quick-Braised Ginger Pork with Winter Citrus

Assessment: “Machine learning is good for certain things, like getting factual questions answered. AI mined my content near and far, and got some things right but not others. Good recipes contain nuances in instructions that offer visual and taste cues.”

Critiques: “Quantities were off—often way off. The rice bowl is only good for a desperate moment. The ginger pork is an awful mash up of ideas. Yuck.”

GRADE: C/C+