Wasted Hallways and Oversized Circulation

Written by Simone Schenkel

This is Part 15 of the Design Pitfalls in Australian Homes series. The previous posts in the series have looked at specific rooms; today’s one is about the bits between the rooms — and how often they’re treated as a free dumping ground for square metres that nobody knew what else to do with.

Why Hallways Are So Often Bad

Walk into a lot of new Australian homes — particularly off-the-plan apartments, volume builder designs, and slightly oversized custom builds — and one of the first things you notice is the amount of hallway.

Long hallways. Wide hallways. Hallways with a small alcove halfway down that doesn’t quite know what it is. Hallways flowing into other hallways. An entry that’s almost a room. A landing upstairs that’s basically empty.

Often the rooms themselves are not that big. The bedrooms can be tight (see the small bedrooms post). The kitchen might be modest. The bathrooms can be cramped.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, there’s a generous corridor doing nothing.

This is the problem with wasted hallway space: it can make a home feel large on paper while leaving the rooms you actually use smaller than they need to be.

Why It Happens

Designing a compact, efficient floor plan is genuinely hard work.

It’s much easier to:

• string rooms along a hallway one after another, with the hallway as the connector

• give the entry “presence” with a wide foyer

• design a generous upstairs landing because the floor area is there and nobody knows what to do with it

• accept a bit of leftover space when the room geometry doesn’t quite line up

• prioritise the marketable rooms (kitchen, master suite, living room) and let circulation absorb the leftover

The result is a plan where 15–25% of the floor area is given over to circulation. In a really compact, well-designed plan, that number should be closer to 8–12%.

The difference is large. On a 200m² house, an extra 10% of circulation is 20m². That’s a bedroom. Or a study. Or a much bigger living area.

That’s why wasted hallway space isn’t just a minor design issue. It can represent a substantial amount of the home’s total floor area.

What Wasted Circulation Costs You

Every square metre of hallway costs:

• Money to build. Floor structure, walls, ceiling, finishes, lighting. Hallways aren’t free, even if they’re unfurnished.

• Money to heat and cool. Hallways have air volume. They need conditioning. A long, wide hallway is a chunk of space your air-conditioner is working on.

• Money to clean and maintain. Floors, walls, light fittings, skirting boards. All on your list.

• Floor area you could have given to a useful room. The most expensive consequence. Each metre of hallway is a metre that didn’t go to a bigger living room, a proper laundry, a generous bedroom or a mudroom.

In an Australian housing market where every square metre is expensive, wasted hallway space is a quietly major cost.

You’re not just paying to build the corridor. You’re paying to own, heat, cool, clean and maintain it for as long as you live in the house.

What “Wasted” Actually Looks Like

A few specific patterns I see again and again:

• The bowling alley hallway. A long, narrow, unwindowed hallway running down the middle of a single-storey house, with three or four bedrooms off it. The hallway is sometimes 5–7m long and 1.2–1.5m wide. That’s 6–10m² of dark, finger-marked plasterboard, doing no work.

• The double-doored entry foyer. A “grand entry” that’s really a 2.5m × 3m room with a door and a chandelier. In a 200m² home, that’s 3.75% of the entire floor area dedicated to the act of standing still before you go anywhere.

• The walk-around kitchen island in a too-small kitchen. Where the island is correctly sized but the walking space around it is so tight you can’t open the dishwasher and the oven at the same time — and yet somehow there’s a 1.5m corridor leading into the kitchen that’s wider than needed.

• The pointless upstairs landing. Three doors and a balustrade, with a 3m × 2.5m blob of carpet between them. No furniture. No purpose. Just leftover floor.

• The hallway that opens into another hallway. A T-junction or L-shape that requires a bit of circulation space at the intersection, even when the connecting hallway is doing nothing useful.

Once you start noticing these patterns, you’ll see wasted hallway space in almost every new home you walk through.

What Good Circulation Looks Like

In a well-designed plan, hallways are:

• Short. You go from one zone to another with minimal travel.

• Narrow but generous enough — typically 1000–1100mm clear width, sometimes 1200mm in feature locations.

• Functional. They include something useful — built-in storage along the walls, art, a window with a view.

• Naturally lit where possible, via a window at the end or a skylight (with external shading — coming up later in this series).

• Counted into the design. Circulation is allocated deliberately, not absorbed as leftover.

The goal isn’t to eliminate hallways. Good circulation is essential. The goal is to eliminate wasted hallway space and make every part of the floor plan work harder.

In a great plan, you genuinely can’t make the rooms any bigger without making something else worse. Every square metre is doing a job.

Compact Floor Plans Are More Sustainable

This is the bit that connects directly back to the Heat, Health and Housing post and to Passive House thinking.

A smaller, more compact home:

• Costs less to build (less material, less labour, less site impact).

• Costs less to heat and cool (less volume, smaller envelope).

• Has a smaller embodied carbon footprint.

• Is faster and cheaper to maintain.

• Often performs better thermally because the surface-area-to-volume ratio is more efficient.

Bigger isn’t better. Better is better.

A 180m² home with no wasted space lives larger than a 220m² home with 30m² of hallway and a “feature entry.” It also costs around $150,000 less to build, depending on your part of the country, and a few thousand a year less to run.

Good planning is about getting more useful living out of less building. Eliminating wasted hallway space is one of the simplest ways to do that.

“But Big Homes Sell”

The counter-argument I always hear from developers and volume builders: the market wants big homes. People look at total floor area and feel they’re getting more for their money.

There’s truth in that, particularly in the new-build market where buyers compare homes by bedroom count and total square metres.

But there’s also a quiet shift happening. Buyers are becoming more savvy. People who have lived in homes with wasted hallways are increasingly aware of the difference between size and quality of space. Architects and builders who can articulate why a 180m² compact home is a better home than a 230m² inefficient one will, over time, win that argument.

The number on the floor plan isn’t the same thing as useful space. A home can be technically large while still feeling cramped where it matters — and wasted hallway space is often part of the reason.

What to Look For When You Walk a Plan

Whether you’re commissioning a custom design, buying off the plan, or assessing a volume builder’s brochure, a few questions to ask:

• What percentage of the total area is circulation? Anything over about 15% deserves scrutiny.

• Is there any hallway over 5m long? Can it be split, shortened, or absorbed into a room?

• Is the entry doing a job? Does it have storage, a place for shoes, a bench? If not, it’s just empty floor.

• Does any hallway have a window or a natural light source? Dark hallways feel unfair to spend money on.

• Is there any space labelled “void,” “feature,” “gallery” or “landing” that doesn’t have a clear function?

These questions can help you identify wasted hallway space before you’ve paid to build it.

My Take

The best compliment a small home can get is “it feels much bigger than it is.” The worst compliment a large home can get is “I’m not sure where all the space went.”

Compact planning is one of the highest-value, lowest-glamour skills in residential design. It saves money, it improves performance, it gives you more useful rooms inside the same envelope. It just takes more thought than the standard hallway-with-rooms-off-it approach.

Don’t pay for hallways you don’t need. Wasted hallway space is still space you’re paying for — it just isn’t giving you much back.

Want to Talk Through Your Own Floor Plan?

If you’re designing, renovating or considering a new home and you’re not sure whether your floor plan is making the best use of the space, our free 30-minute design consultation is a good place to start.

We can talk through your site, layout, and priorities, and look for opportunities to make the home more functional, comfortable, and efficient.

Book a free 30-minute design consultation →

Up Next

Next in the series: no mudroom or drop zone near the entry — and why it matters.

This is Part 15 of the Design Pitfalls in Australian Homes series. Browse the full series to see all the design choices that look great in theory and fall over in real life.