how to connect two "rooms"

[Jeff24]

How can connect too "spaces" that have a door and have it be one "room"? A prime (though not only) example of this is a bedroom with a closet. The closet has a door which makes Home Designer think it's a different room. Several problems: 1) I don't particularly want to label the closet and 2) I do want the closet space to count in the room's area. There are other examples where a stair well/foyer has a closable door for sound mitigation but really it is one space. Again, we want one label and one area calculation.

 

It would be great if there was an option on doors to say "Don't divide spaces". Sort of the anti-room divider.

[Rookie65]

Try changing the walls the doors are in to "no room definition". 

[Jeff24]

Cool idea. That worked as-is for one of the situations but for the others, the wall with the door-to-be-ignored also helps define other rooms. For those I had to use the context menu on the wall and "Add break" (or two) at appropriate places. Magic. Thanks

[y-g-m-n]

all enclosed spaces are defined as rooms for sake of software.

 

Not sure really what you are looking for.

 

You can open up room definition box and turn off label and it will not be named nor show dims/area.

 

And yes a closet is not a bedroom.... in architectural terms.

they are 2 distinct rooms, just as your stairwell is if each end seals off with doors.

[Jeff24]

I think your first sentence captured the issue: "for the sake of the software". The software wants an enclosed space to be a "room", but users don't necessarily want such a direct mapping. This is demonstrated by the existence "Room divider" feature that allows users to take a single space and divide it into many rooms. This is common in open floor plans. Using your logic, an open kitchen, dining, living area is one "room". Architects and residents who look at function, use and layout would likely say that the space has three "rooms" while engineers/builders who look at how it's built might look at it as one.

 

So, in the same way that one space might be several rooms (see above), I'd like to say that several spaces are one room (sleeping area + closet = bedroom). One possible implementation would be to have a door option that marks it as "No room definition" -- it does not participate in room definition. A less direct way was suggested in prior comments where walls are marked as "No room definition" (again an example of the need for separate spaces to not necessarily be separate rooms). Either way, the user has the freedom to define which spaces constitute "rooms" however they want. 

 

My user goals here are:

• all spaces part of some room that makes sense from a user point of view
• all floor plan area is accounted for in the appropriate room
• the value of area label for a room reflects the total area of all related spaces

In short, a bedroom composed of a 100sqft sleeping area and a 20sqft closet should show as "Bedroom 120sqft".

 

In any event, @Rookie65 pointed me in a direction that works (thanks!). If any Home Designer staff are looking at this, please consider a "No room definition" option for doors (and windows for that matter).