Rooms and sightlines
Your workbook · tool 3

Room connections and sightline map

The rooms, what they open onto, what is seen from where, and the few colors and materials that travel through the home.

Rooms

One row per room in the project. "Opens onto" is a comma-separated list of other rooms' names exactly as you wrote them in this sheet; the map draws a link for each one. "Floor continues from" names the room whose floor runs into this one without a change; the map draws that as a heavier, fainter link, because a continuous floor is often the home's largest repeater.

Sightlines and thresholds

One row per place you commonly stand or sit, in the room it is in. When "standing at" and "looking toward" both contain a room name from the rooms sheet, the map draws a dashed arrow between them. "Where two wall colors would meet" is the line a change of color would stop at, or "color continues" if there is no line.

Colors that repeat across rooms

Two or three rows is common: often the trim, the floor's wood tone and one accent, though a home can also be linked by one wall color, a shared value or a recurring material, and a room can be deliberately its own world. For each repeat, say which role it plays and at what size in each room it appears in; a color that is the dominant in one room can be the accent in the next.

Map

A schematic drawn from your rows: each room a box, a solid link where one room opens onto another, a faint heavier link where a floor continues, a dashed arrow for each sightline. It is a diagram of connections, not a floor plan; its layout is a grid and means nothing about size or position. It redraws as you type.

How to use this sheet

  • Rooms first, then stand in the doorways. List the rooms, name their neighbors, then do Module 7's walk: the front door, every doorway, every seat. Three to six sightlines is typical.
  • Name the threshold. A doorway with casing gives two colors a clean stop; an arch, a floor change, a corner or a beam each behave differently; an open plan has no built-in stop. The type helps you judge whether a wall color change there will look intentional; a change away from a line can still work if it is deliberate.
  • Importance ranks the work. A "daily" sightline (from the sofa, from the front door) is where the walk-through test is done first; a "sometimes" sightline (from the guest room) can tolerate more.
  • The repeats sheet is the home's palette. The palette tool holds each room's colors; this sheet holds the few that travel, if you choose to carry any. Tick "repeats across rooms" for the same colors in the palette builder so the two sheets agree.
  • Write the sentence. "What repeats is ___; what is allowed to vary is ___." Add how it serves what your brief asked for. Put it in the first rooms row's notes or in the palette notes.
  • Use the map to check, not to design. If a room has no link, you have not said what it opens onto; if a sightline draws no arrow, one of its names does not match a room. Fix the rows, not the map.
  • Revisit after Module 9. When two adjacent rooms have sample boards, do the walk-through test on each daily sightline and note the result in the sightline's notes.
Fictional home

The example rows are Juniper Court: the Okafors' 2010s open plan, where the kitchen's gray-veined white quartz and espresso cabinets and the living room's rust sofa and tan armchairs felt like two houses. The rooms sheet lists the entry, the open living room and kitchen, the hall and two bedrooms; the four sightline rows are the three Module 7 draws on its plan, with the view from the hall split into two rows (toward the living room, and toward the bedroom doors); the three repeats are the decisions from that module's walkthrough (the espresso brought into the living room, the rust brought into the kitchen, and one wall color across the plan). Window directions in the example are invented for the example only.

Limits

The map is a diagram of what you typed: boxes and links on a grid, with no sizes, positions or colors. It cannot tell you whether two rooms' colors agree at the threshold; only the walk-through test with physical samples in the doorway, at the hours the rooms are used, can (Module 7 and Module 9). Compass directions in the rooms sheet are a hypothesis to check by observation, not a rule about the light; in the southern hemisphere the north and south conventions reverse.