Depending on your budget and how much structural work you want to have done, you could keep most of it the same. But you would loose your meals room. extend your laundry to the door of the meals room, turn your laundry side ways this will give you access to the out side, on the other side of the laundry extend your wall pass the internal door of the meals room to create a walk in pantry, extend kitchen gallery to laundry and pantry, open up internal walls of kitchen to living room and dinning room creating a beautiful Island bench looking into living room. open up external dining room wall for sliding doors to bring the inside out. because there is a walk in pantry there would be no need for upper counters so u could also have a bar at the kitchen window on the outside. Doing it this way you would save a lot of money not having to move plumbing and electrical in the kitchen. You would have to walk through your kitchen to get to laundry though.

Thank you for all the replies and suggestions. Although the kitchen, dining and the entry area at large would benefit from moving the bedroom door inside, I tend to agree that the privacy and function suffer more from a bedroom door within the lounge. I was suggested elsewhere to widen the lounge entrance and remove its door thus making the layout more open and "modern". I think this would not help, though, with the door positioning problem - either way. Bigreader, bedroom 2 = top room on the layout? It can be used as a spare bedroom but it is surrounded with shutters and large windows. I think It better suited for leisure or as a work space. Oklouise, thank you for the effort in redrawing the layout and experimenting with it. The suggestion for exchanging the hinges direction is spot on. The bathroom is not built yet. I am considering replacing the bath with a partly open shower:

it's a very strange plan for a new build but of course we're used to looking at Australian plans...who will use the downstairs bathroom and three living areas and how many will live in the house and do you expect to have long stay guests? is there an upstairs bathroom you'll be sorry if there isn't.....do you have no neighbours and great views in every direction?..what is the distance from the outside walls to the boundaries....i suggest that you need to spend more time thinking about how you'll live in the house before choosing windows..if you enlarge the plan and make some cut out scale sized furniture you can trial different ways that furniture and kitchen cabinets can be placed in the rooms and make sure that you allow at least 1m pathways around the furniture..even if you have to pay for local authorities to reconsider the plans it's very important to make sure that you have the best possible arrangements..it costs no different to build a better plan and you'll enjoy the benefits for the lifetime of the house...can you repost the plans with dimensions clearly shown and also add a copy of the upstairs and you should receive lots of great ideas and i'll also redraw some ideas to consider

'best way to make this decisions is to add scale sized furniture to the space and unless you have the TV wall moved then the existing arrangement should be fine with the lounge facing the TV but there seems to be too much wasted space in the central hallway that could be better used in the rooms or even better added to outside