I used to think columns were just something old buildings had because they didn’t know how to do better engineering.
The Structural Reality of Columns That Nobody Tells You About When You’re Tearing Down Walls
Turns out—and this is the thing architects get weirdly quiet about—roughly 60% of open floor plan renovations hit a structural column they can’t remove. You knock down a wall expecting this glorious cathedral of space, and there it is: a load-bearingpost right in the middle of where your kitchen island was supposed to go. The engineer shows up, does some calculations, and says something like “well, you could remove it if you want to spend $40,000 on steel beams and sistering joists, or you could just… work with it.” I’ve seen people literally sit on the floor of their half-demolished houses and cry over this. Not because they’re unreasonable, but because every single Pinterest board and HGTV episode makes it look like columns just don’t exist in modern homes. Here’s the thing though: some of the most interesting residential spaces I’ve encountered—the ones that actually feel like someone lives there rather than a furniture catalog—they kept the columns and made them integral to how the space breathes.
Wait—maybe I should back up. When we talk about incorporating columns into open plans, we’re usually dealing with one of three scenarios: structural columns you can’t remove, decorative columns the previous owner added (often in the 1980s, often regrettable), or new columns you’re intentionally introducing to define zones without walls.
The last option sounds counterintuitive until you’ve lived in a truly open space and realized you can hear your teenager’s video game from literally everywhere.
Using Columns as Spatial Punctuation Instead of Obstacles You Apologize For
Anyway, the shift happens when you stop thinking of columns as problems and start treating them like commas in a sentence—they create pause, they establish rhythm, they signal that one thought is ending and another beginning. In a 2019 study from the Journal of Interior Design (I think it was 2019, maybe 2018), researchers found that people consistently underestimated how much they relied on subtle visual markers to subconciously define activity zones in their homes. Columns do this work without the visual weight of walls. You can position a column to mark the transition between kitchen and dining area—not blocking sightlines, but creating just enough of a threshold that your brain registers the shift. I guess it’s similar to how you don’t need a door to know when you’ve walked from a sidewalk into a park; something about the space just changes.
The practical execution varies wildly depending on your column’s girth and your tolerance for drama.
Slim steel columns (usually 4-6 inches) almost disappear if you paint them the same color as your ceiling—they recede into visual background noise. Thicker wooden columns (8-12 inches) can anchor furniture arrangements; I’ve seen designers flank them with back-to-back bookshelves to create a semi-permeable divider between living and dining zones. The really thick structural posts, the ones that make you wonder what kind of massive loads they’re supporting—those you might wrap in something textural. Not the fake stone veneer thing from 2003, please, but maybe reclaimed wood that picks up warmth, or even just drywall with really crisp edges and good paint. One architect I know—works mostly on brownstone renovations in Brooklyn—she’s started wrapping columns in the same tile as kitchen backsplashes, which sounds insane until you see it and realize it creates this visual continuity that pulls the whole floor together.
Honestly, the biggest mistake is trying to hide them.
The Weird Psychology of Columns and How They Actually Make Big Spaces Feel Less Like Airport Terminals
There’s this paradox where adding vertical elements to an open plan can make it feel more expansive rather than less. I used to think this was design propaganda, but then I spent time in a friend’s loft—2,400 square feet, zero columns, completely open—and it felt simultaneously enormous and weirdly oppressive, like being in a very well-furnished gymnasium. Your eye had nowhere to rest. Everything competed for attention at once. When she finally installed two decorative columns (not structural, just definately aesthetic) to flank her living area, the space settled. It gave your brain permission to focus on one zone without feeling like you were ignoring the rest of the apartment. Turns out the human visual system really likes some vertical interruption; it’s how we’ve been reading landscapes for roughly 200,000 years, give or take. Trees, rock formations, other people standing around—vertical markers help us parse space into manageable chunks.
The lighting component matters more than people expect too. If you run pendant lights from a column or use uplighting at its base, you transform it from obstacle into feature—something that adds to the material richness of the space rather than just taking up square footage. I’ve seen columns with integrated shelving, columns that house electrical outlets and USB ports (genuinely useful), columns wrapped in pegboard for adaptable storage in maker spaces.
The goal isn’t to make the column disappear or to make it the star of the show—it’s to let it do the quiet infrastructural work of organizing space while contributing to the overall texture and rhythm of how you move through your home. Which sounds precious when I write it out like that, but it’s really just acknowledging that open floor plans need some kind of structure, and columns—whether you chose them or inherited them—can provide exactly that.
