A House Where the Grandchildren Grow Up: Planning for Three Generations

A house meant to outlive its owner is designed differently. Not stronger, not more expensive — differently. When we sit down to discuss a multigenerational house plan, the layout stops being an arrangement of rooms and becomes a script for the next forty years: who will sleep here in two decades, who will stay, who will come back, who will stop climbing the stairs. Most private residences in Russia are designed for the family as it exists on signing day. That is the central architectural mistake of the past decade.

We are watching that change. Five years ago, the client commissioning a thousand-square-metre estate dreamed of a house for himself and his wife, with the children as weekend guests. Today the briefs read differently: “a wing for my mother”, “a separate entrance for my son and his family”, “so that in thirty years my grandchildren live here, not an estate agent showing the property”.

Why multigenerational living stopped being a last resort

For a long time, several generations under one roof signalled a lack of money. Couldn’t afford a second flat — so we live together. The numbers now say the opposite: it is a deliberate choice made by wealthy families.

According to the National Association of Realtors, 17% of all American home buyers purchased a multigenerational home in 2024 — the highest share ever recorded, up from 14% a year earlier. The motive matters more than the figure: 36% named cost savings as the main reason, against just 15% in 2015. The rest is care and continuity — 21% of these households formed because children over eighteen moved back home, and another 20% because they never left. The leaders are not retirees but Generation X: people between 45 and 60, whose parents are ageing while their children are in no hurry to leave.

Russia does not track this in comparable detail, but the top of the market shows the same vector. A client building a house of 1,000 m² or more is almost always solving two problems at once: comfort for parents in their seventies and a future for children still at university. The house becomes a family asset — and, frankly, a device for keeping the family in one place.

But this is where it gets interesting. Wanting everyone under one roof and being able to live under it together are entirely different things, and the distance between them is pure architecture.

A multigenerational house plan begins with privacy, not floor area

The most common illusion: “we’ll have fifteen hundred square metres, there’s room for everyone”. There isn’t. Conflict in a shared house comes from missing boundaries, not from tight space. People feel at home where they can close a door behind them and account to no one for when they came back or what they had for breakfast.

So the first design decision is not the number of bedrooms but the number of autonomous domestic circuits. A proper wing for the older generation is not a bedroom with an en suite. It is a bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting room that doubles as a study, a kitchenette with a sink, a fridge and two hob rings, a store cupboard — and, without exception, its own entrance from outside. Parents must be able to receive their own guests without crossing the family zone.

The second master suite, for an adult child with a family of their own, we place diagonally opposite the parents’ wing. The split-bedroom principle works at estate scale: the main suite in one wing, the second generation in the other, shared spaces in between acting as a buffer. Sound does not travel through two corridors and a living room.

Where it usually goes wrong

The mistake is nearly always the same: autonomy gets imitated rather than built. A separate entrance is drawn — but it opens onto the shared terrace. A kitchenette is provided — with no extraction and no sink, which makes it a sideboard. A wing is planned, but the single laundry serves the whole house, so every morning begins with a meeting by the washing machine.

And here is the larger error: assuming a three-generation house is an ordinary house with an extra floor. It is in fact two or three houses joined by a shared core. The architect’s job is to make the seam invisible but real.

Acoustics: the first thing that breaks a shared life

No family has ever fallen out over an unsuccessful facade. They fall out because a grandson plays the piano at ten in the evening and a grandfather is up at six with the television on.

Russian code SP 51.13330.2011 requires an airborne sound insulation index of at least Rw = 54 dB for party walls between flats, and 43 dB for internal partitions. For private houses there is no requirement at all: build as you please. And so people do — half a brick of aerated block between the generations’ bedrooms, followed by surprise.

Our practice: the boundary between generational blocks is designed as a party wall with margin — a target of roughly 60–62 dB. That means a decoupled double frame, mineral wool of at least 45 kg/m³ in the cavity, double boarding with staggered joints and elastic junctions at the slab. At that level, raised voices next door become an indistinct background.

Impact noise is a separate story, and walls do nothing for it. Footsteps, a dumbbell dropped in the gym, a child’s scooter down the corridor all travel through the slab. Only a floating screed on a resilient layer solves it — isolated at the perimeter, with every rigid bridge broken, including door thresholds and balustrade posts. One forgotten screw through the membrane into the slab undoes the entire detail. That is why in houses with complex internal structure we specify acoustics in the structural design package rather than leaving it to the finishing crew.

The vertical: a staircase that will one day become a problem

The client is fifty-two. He is in excellent shape, cycles, and considers the staircase one of the house’s virtues. We ask how he plans to live in this house at seventy-eight. Usually there is a pause.

A domestic lift is not a luxury; it is insurance against the upper floor ceasing to exist in twenty years. Technically it has long since stopped being difficult. A hydraulic drive needs a pit from 200 mm (some models from 50–150 mm), an electric one from 350 mm; minimum top-floor height is around 2,450 mm for hydraulic and 3,000 mm for electric units. A 1,000 × 1,250 mm car takes a wheelchair user with a companion. Equipment is certified to GOST R 55555-2013 and GOST 5746-2015.

The crucial point lies elsewhere. The shaft must be built into the structure even if the lift itself is years away. An empty vertical shaft with reinforced walls and a prepared pit costs almost nothing at shell stage, compared with cutting a lift into a finished house lined with solid timber and marble. We usually propose a compromise: the shaft goes into the structural design and, for now, holds stacked wardrobes. In fifteen years they come out in a week.

The same principle governs openings: 900 mm clear width, no thresholds, a wet room with a floor drain instead of a shower tray, and blocking in the walls for future grab rails in the older wing’s bathrooms. None of it looks clinical when it is decided at design stage rather than retrofitted. That is exactly how one of our larger family houses was arranged — internal vertical circulation, a spa level and clearly separated generational zones; you can see it in the Notturno project.

Our approach: designing in three tenses

We ask the client to describe three scenarios. Today: who lives here, how many at the table, where the nanny sleeps. In ten years: the children have grown up, someone has brought a partner, the parents are approaching eighty. In twenty-five: the house may have passed to the next generation, and the older wing has become guest quarters or a study.

From those three scenarios comes a principle we call the reversible plan. It is simple: any wing must be able to become something else without moving wet points or structure. In practice that means risers are grouped and oversized, the children’s wing already has the drainage for a future master suite, and the study and the bedroom have identical footprints with equal access to services.

One client — a family building an estate for three adult children — changed the cast of future residents three times during design: the daughter left, then returned with a husband, then the client’s mother moved in. The plan absorbed all three versions without touching the structure, because we had laid out groups capable of swapping roles rather than fixed rooms. The same logic underpins the estate we built at Sady Mayendorf: a central formal axis with autonomous blocks around it.

The grounds divide too

The plot is what people forget in multigenerational projects, yet a shared garden causes as much friction as a shared kitchen. What works: a private terrace off the parents’ wing facing the quiet part of the garden; independent parking and a separate driveway for the adult child’s family; leisure zones set apart, so the pool and the play area are not in the older generation’s line of sight. A guest house solves a great deal but not everything — elderly parents generally need to be in the main house, since nobody crosses a frozen garden in February.

What it actually costs

The honest answer: autonomy adds roughly 8–15% to the shell-and-services budget. That covers a separate utility intake, duplicated heating circuits with independent temperature control per wing (older people want +24 °C, teenagers +19 °C — physiology, not caprice), upgraded acoustics, the lift shaft and the second domestic circuit.

And it is money that is nearly impossible to spend later. Finishes can always be redone. Cutting a shaft through slabs, running a second intake and re-drawing acoustic boundaries in a completed house means building it again. Which is why everything to do with generational scenarios is settled at the earliest stage, before the concept sketch, during construction preparation.

The house as a dynastic project

There is a simple test for family architecture. Imagine the house is gone, and ask what the grandchildren would miss. The floor area? The marble in the hall? Almost never. They miss the room where everyone sat together, the staircase they were photographed on, the kitchen that smelled a certain way every morning.

A house for several generations is a bet that the family will remain a family. Architecture cannot guarantee that, but it can get badly in the way — with a thin wall, a single staircase, a kitchen where two cooks cannot pass. Or it can help, through a well-placed boundary behind which everyone remains themselves.

These are the houses we design, and we usually open the conversation not with area and style but with a question: who will be living here in thirty years? If you have an answer, or only an intuition, tell us — at a first meeting or in our Telegram channel. Good family houses always begin with that conversation.