Reading a floor plan like an architect

A floor plan is a horizontal slice through a building, drawn about a metre above the floor. It’s the most useful document you’ll see when buying a home, and the one most people glance at for room sizes and put away.

Start with the walls

Thick walls are usually structural or external; thin ones are partitions that could, in principle, move. Look for the gaps in the thick walls. Those are your windows, and their size and direction will shape how each room feels.

Follow the routes

Trace how you’d move through the home: front door to kitchen with the shopping, bedroom to bathroom at night, living room to garden. Good plans keep these routes short and don’t make you walk through one room to reach another.

Small symbols, big clues

A quarter-circle shows which way a door swings. Parallel lines in a wall mark a window. Hatched areas are usually terraces or balconies. Every plan we draw includes a scale bar and a north arrow, so you can see how big the rooms are and where the light comes from.

What a plan can’t tell you

Ceiling heights, views and noise don’t appear on a plan. That’s why we suggest pairing every plan with a section drawing where one exists, and always with a visit.