Planning Your Morning Room
What is a Morning Room?
A morning room is an English term we picked up and started using to describe a casual family dining room which we including in most every home we design and build. A typical size would 12 feet by 12 feet. It is connected to the kitchen and sometimes also to the family or gathering room. The best rooms have plenty of windows, usually on three sizes and they project from the side of the house. The morning room becomes a comfortable place for a family to have meals without the formality of the dining room. It also becomes a place to gather for any number of family activities
How to Design a Morning
We take the design of a morning room very seriously so we get the desired result; a comfortable casual room for the family to eat with plenty of light throughout the day. Here are the things we think about when we design a morning room. By the way this applies to the design whether it is a new home we are design or a renovation. In either case the room should feel like part of the original plan and not a second thought!
Where it should be?
The position of the morning room is very important. The ideal location is the south end of a home with eastern and western exposures. This gives you the most constant natural light throughout the day. The first light of the day will shine through the east facing windows in the morning. Throughout the day southern light will brighten the room and finally western light will float through your west facing window until sunset.
How it large it should be?
Morning rooms should be large enough to hold your family comfortably at a table for meals and not much larger. We try to get them to be cozy rather than imposing. As we mentioned earlier a common size is 12×12 ft but we have made them as small as 8ft x 8 ft and as large as 14ft x 18ft.
How many windows?
The answer to this question is there are never too many windows in a morning room for our liking. One thought is to bring the outdoors into this room; to make you feel like you are surrounded by the outdoors. Having wall space inhibits that. So we try to design large picture type and operating windows into the design. If the room is adjacent to a patio then a set of French doors is also a great addition.
How should it relate to the other rooms of the house?
Morning rooms are most frequently located immediately adjacent or as an extension of the kitchen. We also locate them in a position which provides access to both the kitchen and family room as the floor plans here show.
How to finish the morning room.
Finishing the room from an architectural point of view is truly a matter of preference. Since it has a large number of windows the window casing, window sills and other trim are important. A crown detail is important. We have done morning room ceilings, for example, in bead board, with beams and even coffered. The idea is likely to move toward casual and comfortable.
Hunter Roberts Homes and Wellington Chase have found that a morning room is a wonderful inclusion in a home. Our clients’ love them and never regret making them part of their home.
Hunter Roberts Homes and Wellington Chase Homes are related design/build businesses doing new residential design build and renovation design build in Michigan. We operate primarily in the Oakland County cities, townships and villages of Birmingham, Bloomfield Village, Bloomfield Hills, Bloomfield Township, West Bloomfield, Franklin, Sylvan Lake, Beverly Hills, Orchard Lake, Bingham Farms, Huntington Woods, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak, Berkley, Ferndale and Troy
