The term great room denotes a room space within an abode which combines the specific functions of several of the more traditional room spaces (e.g. the family room

Family room

A family room is an informal, all-purpose room in a house similar to a living room. The family room is designed to be a place where family and guests gather for group recreation like talking, reading, watching TV, and other family activities. Often, the family room is located adjacent to the...

, the living room

Living room

A living room, also known as sitting room, lounge room or lounge , is a room for entertaining adult guests, reading, or other activities...

, the study

Study (room)

A study is a room in a house which is used for paperwork, computer work, or reading. Historically, the study of a house was reserved for use as the private office and reading room of a family father as the formal head of a household, but today studies are generally either used to operate a home...

, etc.) into a singular unified space. Great rooms are typically at or near the center of the house, feature raised ceilings, and have been common in American homes since the early 1990s.

The New York Times called the great room "the McMansion

McMansion

McMansion is a pejorative term for a large new house which is judged as pretentious, tasteless, or badly designed for its neighborhood. Alternately, a McMansion is a large house in a sub-division of similarly large houses, which all seem mass produced and lacking distinguishing characteristics, and...

's signature space."

Description

The concept of a great room hearkens back to the romanticized ideal of great hall

Great hall

A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, nobleman's castle or a large manor house in the Middle Ages, and in the country houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries. At that time the word great simply meant big, and had not acquired its modern connotations of excellence...

s and great chamber

Great chamber

The great chamber was the second most important room in a medieval or Tudor English castle, palace, mansion or manor house after the great hall. Medieval great halls were the ceremonial centre of household and were not private at all; the gentlemen attendants and the servants would come and go all...

s in medieval castles, which contained one large central room where everything happened. Developers of mid-range suburban homes in America tried to solve the problem of the "dead" living room and the split between the living and family rooms by "returning" to the idea of the great room. The general concept is one relatively central room, the crossroads of the house to be used for all of the family functions traditionally split between living and family rooms. The dominant feature of the great room is the raised ceiling, higher than other parts of the house, typically two stories with arching ceilings often referred to in real estate jargon as "cathedral ceilings".

Different great rooms will combine different functions, e.g. some may incorporate a reading area, thus bringing the traditional study function into the scheme of the room, while others may forgo this particular function. Some great room designs incorporate the functions of the traditional dining room

Dining room

A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level...

 as well. In the most general sense, great rooms are typically found on the lower level of American multi-story homes built in the second half of the 20th century. In many houses the great room will also adjoin the kitchen, often separated just by a counter instead of a full wall.

History

The modern great room concept traces back to the "multipurpose room" in modernist homes built by Joseph Eichler

Joseph Eichler

Joseph Eichler was a 20th century post-war U.S. American real estate developer known for developing distinctive residential subdivisions of Mid-Century modern style Tract housing in California, United States. He was one of the influential advocates of bringing modern architecture from custom...

 in California in the 1950s and 1960s. Developers started building high-end houses with great rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, at first simply adding vaulted entryways to ranch-style houses. An example of this is the house in the television series The Brady Bunch

The Brady Bunch

The Brady Bunch is an American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz and starring Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, and Ann B. Davis. The series revolved around a large blended family...

. Great rooms became a nearly ubiquitous feature of suburban homes constructed in America in the 1990s and 2000s.

However, by the mid-2000s, Wall Street Journal reported that home buyers were not as enthusiastic about great rooms. Common complaints included the cost to heat and cool them, that they were difficult to clean and paint due the height and irregular angles, and that they simply were wasted space.

Great rooms were initially popular with homeowners. According to builders asked by the Wall Street Journal, this was because homeowners wanted a way to show off wealth in a growing economy. But about 15 years after great rooms became widely popular in the early 1990s, developers across America were getting fewer demands for houses with great rooms, preferring instead houses with increased floor space and numbers of rooms. Owners of existing homes with great rooms were sometimes opting to add new rooms or lofts in the great room's ceiling space, which can cost as much as 50% less than adding a conventional addition to the house. According to the United States Census Bureau, from 2005 to 2007 the number of expenditures on interior restructuring of homes rose about 40% but spending on new-room additions fell 57%, which a census bureau statistician said can be explained in part by the retrofitting of great rooms. However, much of the motivation for working within the existing footprint of the home may be due to state and municipal regulations which may trigger higher taxes, additional permit hurdles, or septic system redesigns when a building's footprint increases.

In 2007, Money

Money (magazine)

Money is published by Time Inc. Its first issue was published in October 1972. Its articles cover the gamut of personal finance topics ranging from investing, saving, retirement and taxes to family finance issues like paying for college, credit, career and home improvement...

listed great rooms as a fad whose time had passed. The magazine reported that a typical great room costs $150 to $350 per square foot, whereas building conventional rooms cost $125 to $250 a square foot, and concluded that the supposed benefits of a great room (unifying family activities into one room) did not justify its cost and maintenance difficulties.