Doors Plus Zone Living (here) looks like a good solution for open plan living here in Australia. It allows you to still keep the open feel of a single large room, but with the economy of multiple zones for cooling or heating.

We have two areas in our house that we was to section off from the other areas of the house for both cooling reasons as well as sound isolation and privacy.

The first of these areas is our family / rumpus / play room at the back of the house.

This area looks pretty easy to separate off from the rest of the house. The door frame is already there, so you should only need the doors and hardware. Those building supplies would cost about $340 from Bunnings for a pair of doors with safety glass.

To use Zone Living in this space would cost about $1600!

I had also looked at using Door Plus’ Zone Living as an option for our office. Since there is no wall there at the moment there would be a lot more involved in this area to put a door in.

One of the features that they claim for Zone Living is:

… assists in shielding noise travelling throughout the home, eliminating one of the major concerns created by open plan living.

Since I record audio in my office, having some sound shielding for the room would be highly beneficial. When I was in their show room though I had a look at some Zone Living examples and wasn’t too impressed.

The gap that you see in the door is present in all examples at the show room. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in it’s ability to provide any noise isolation for the office.

Besides not providing good seals between rooms the cost was also rather high at about $1300!

Even though it will be a bit more work to put in the doors and wall myself, we will NOT be getting Doors Plus Zone Living.