My open-plan living room felt empty and characterless — this £50 DIY divider transformed it

Despite open plan reigning supreme for the last few years, I never really loved the look of a single wide open space with no visual breaks. In guides on how to design an open plan living/kitchen/dining room, you’ll notice there is a real emphasis on zoning — I know, because I’ve written a fair few over the years.

The idea of zoning is so the spaces feel interconnected, but for them to have their own identities. Naturally, this then developed, as all interior trends do, into the ‘broken plan’ layout. Similar to open concept, this style uses physical dividers, such as walls with archways or open doorways to give the circulation flow, but with a certain level of cosiness to each space.

Once my kitchen-dining-sitting layout was finished with builders, it felt void of character, so I got to work one weekend and started plotting an easy DIY project to create a visual break, add colour and character, inspired by mid-century design and broken plan living.

Designing the mid-century divider

Between the kitchen-diner and the living space, we installed a dwarf wall alongside the two small steps for the change in level. It gives the space a cosy feeling like a mid-century conversation pit, without being too on-the-nose.

But the idea was always to create a divider atop the dwarf wall that would encourage the light between the spaces, while making them more separate. One idea was simply to install timber slats, another was glass panels, but after playing around a little bit with different drawings, we ended with a ‘cubby’ idea on three levels to house the different objects, artwork and plants.

The final design also allowed for us to connect two sets of speakers to our record player so when we have people over, or while we are reading/cooking at the same time we can listen to music through the rooms.

How I built the divider

As we were building this DIY, which is made of plywood, my partner made a cut list that maximised the material — which, let’s face it, is not nearly as cheap as it once was — and made use of B&Q’s cutting service.

While we were able to cut small widths at home using a mitre saw, it was substantially easier and quicker to pay for their industrial panel saw in store to get straight and consistent length cuts rather than fight it with our table saw.

For ease of assembly, my partner constructed the ‘cubbies’ row by row, counter sinking screws (which would have a flush finish) into the uprights so they wouldn’t be seen once it was installed, as well as glue for long-term strength.

As the dwarf wall is made of timber, we screwed in the bottom section of the divider to provide stability — it was going to house a lot of treasured and expensive items so we didn’t want it to go toppling over.

The dwarf wall is also hollow so we were also able to drill a hole for a cable to fish through down to a nearby plug, which is then hidden by the sofa. After it was installed, it was time to caulk, prime and paint!

Although we could have left the plywood edge raw to match some of the other furniture pieces my partner has constructed, we opted to paint it all. The key here was to use wood filler, like this Everbuild Multipurpose Wood Filler, £4.78 from Amazon, on the counter-sink holes and the exposed edge to even it out for a uniform finish.

Enjoying the result

The kitchen, dining and living areas are all painted off-white (for now), so I wanted to encourage the theme of greens alongside our kitchen units and windows. We chose Farrow & Ball’s Green Smoke in a high sheen finish and it looks fantastic.

The open structure means that our belongings can be rearranged constantly to freshen the space up. Plus when we have guests over and one person is cooking they can still be involved in the conversation rather than feeling separate.

If we were to commission this style of carpentry, it would have cost us around £300 at least — it probably would have gotten us a slightly better finish, but I’m delighted with how it looks. I think you could achieve a similar look by embracing some IKEA hacks, but I think for the time spent and that we were able to customise the cubby sizes to fit the speakers/record player it was well worth the effort.