Are all hallways wasted space?

Question

Recently I've been really interested in floor plans, mostly for apartments but also for houses. On the apartment side, if you have a 800sqft 2bedroom apartment and have a 4ft x 10ft hallway, then 5% of your apartment is "wasted" hallway space. Likewise, in many 3000sqft houses there are 300+ sqft of hallways.

A lot of older Sears Craftsman style homes have virtually no hallways. The stairs lead directly to 3-4 bedroom/bathroom entrances, and there is no "wasted" hallway space on the first or second floor:

Today, if you wanted a modern floorplan you could have something like this:

Or this:

My take: all hallways are essentially wasted space, and most floor plans being built today are not very good. Agree or disagree?

Jim K. · Answer

@Tom Wagner

Interesting take, but the lack of hallway space was a noted feature of the specific pattern houses you're looking at. The basic design was called the Foursquare, a kind of hybrid production of the Arts and Crafts artistic movement and the Plains School of architecture. The main structural problem with such a lack of hall space, however, would become very evident whenever there was a fire in one of these houses, and everyone on the second floor (and sometimes the attic, which was often finished in two rooms and a small bathroom) ran for the stairs at the same time.Hope some of the local architects chime in on this. Here's the floorplan of 264B148, which looks a lot more the Foursquares I've owned, so you can see the slight differences betwen 264B155, the floorplan you mentioned, also from the 1916 catalog. They both end up having that small hall in the middle of the house leading to the stairs. Attic acccess was usually at one end of that hall.

Theresa Harris · Answer

I don't like long hallways for the reason you mentioned.  A short hallway to separate living and sleeping areas is good-like you have in the top plan.

Even in the larger modern floor plan you really do have a hallway to get to the bedroom.