What room types are used on a floor plan, and does it matter which one you pick?
Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, hallway — most floor plans sort rooms into a fixed set of categories. It is not just decoration: the room type drives the icon on the drawing, and in many apps also what the room is suggested to be called if you do not name it yourself.
Short answer: the room type is a category — living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, hallway, and a handful more — that you pick for each room, typically right after a scan or when the room is created. It is used to show a recognisable icon on the drawing and to suggest the room's name. Pick the wrong one and nothing else happens: the icon and suggested name simply fit poorly. It does not change the measurements or the geometry itself, and you can usually correct it afterwards without scanning again.
Why rooms are sorted into types at all
A floor plan without room types is just a set of lines with numbers on them. That is useful, but hard to read quickly — especially a drawing of an entire home with ten or fifteen rooms. By giving each room a type, the drawing can show a small, recognisable symbol for "this is the bathroom", "this is the kitchen", without you having to read a name to understand the layout. The same principle is used in almost all building drawings and estate agent listings, just often with letter abbreviations instead of icons.
The typical categories across apps and drawings
- Living spaces — living room, family room, lounge.
- Kitchen — often kept separate from the living space, even in open-plan homes.
- Bedroom — usually with a separate symbol for the primary bedroom versus the others.
- Bathroom and toilet — often two different types, because they carry different fitting requirements.
- Hallway and entrance — connecting spaces that are rarely counted in the living area, but still need to be drawn.
- Utility or laundry room — a room with a practical function, kept separate from the kitchen.
- Office or spare room — a flexible room that does not fit the other categories.
- Basement, loft, garage or outbuilding — secondary rooms that are often counted differently in the total area.
Does the choice matter for the area?
No — not directly. The room type is a label, not a measuring rule. A 12 m² room is 12 m², whether you call it an office or a bedroom. Where the type can have an indirect effect is in the combined total: some apps and official registers, for instance, do not count hallway area or secondary rooms (basement, outbuilding) towards the primary living area, while living rooms and bedrooms do count. Pick the wrong type, then, and a room can end up in the wrong column of a summary, even though the room's own square-metre figure is correct.
Can I change the room type afterwards?
In most apps, yes — the room type is rarely locked once the room has been created. Change your mind, or discover that a room you called "office" actually functions as a bedroom, and you can usually go into the room's settings and switch the type without having to scan or redraw the room. That is one of the benefits of keeping room type separate from the geometry itself: one can be changed freely without affecting the other.
Why a name isn't always enough
You might ask why apps do not simply let you write a free name for each room and skip the categories altogether. The answer is that a free name is hard to recognise quickly across an entire drawing, or to sort by in a list. Call a room "Emma's room", and the app has no way of knowing whether it is a bedroom or an office without a type alongside it. Most solutions therefore combine a free name (for the personal touch) with a type (for the structure) — you get both, not a choice between them.
What if a room doesn't fit any of the categories?
Most category sets have a broad "other" or "room" type for spaces that do not fit the more specific boxes — a hobby room, a storage room, a porch. It is rarely a problem to pick the broadest category that fits reasonably well, and let the free name field carry the precise description instead. The icon's accuracy is secondary to the room being on the drawing at all, with correct measurements.
Room type and official registers — an important distinction
It is worth keeping an app's internal room types separate from the categories a public building authority uses to register a home. An app's "office" is a visual category for your own drawing; the authority's categories (for example "room" versus "living space" in a housing register) can carry legal or tax significance and often follow different, stricter rules — for example requirements for a window, ceiling height or access, before a room may count as habitable. Choosing a type in an app does not change the room's status in an official register — the two systems do not talk to each other.
A practical example
Imagine you scan a house with ten rooms: a living room, kitchen, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a hallway, a utility room, and an office that was originally intended as a fourth bedroom. Pick "office" for that last room, and the drawing correctly shows it as a workroom, and a summary count may tally it differently than if you had picked "bedroom". If the room is actually used as a bedroom day to day, it is worth correcting the type, so the drawing — and any figures derived from it, such as the number of bedrooms — matches reality, not just the original building plan.
What HouseSense does
In HouseSense, you pick a room type from an icon picker with 13 types, right after a scan finishes — it is a mandatory step, and the type is used as the room's name if you do not write one yourself. The type can always be changed afterwards in the room's settings, without affecting the scanned geometry or the measured figures. The feature belongs to the scanning flow itself and therefore requires LiDAR, like the rest of room scanning.
Room types across multiple homes
If you use an app to keep track of more than one home — your own place and a home you are considering buying, for example — room types become extra useful, because they make it possible to compare across the two. If both homes have three bedrooms, but one house's "third bedroom" is actually a small office with no proper window, it is the type — not the name — that reveals the difference fastest when you compare two drawings side by side. That is one of the quiet benefits of structured data over free text: it can be sorted, counted and compared without you having to read every single room description yourself.
How to pick the right type the first time
- Pick by actual use, not original intent. If the former bedroom is used as an office, pick office.
- Use the free name field for the personal touch, and let the type carry the structure — "Emma's room" as the name, "bedroom" as the type.
- Pick the broadest category that fits, if nothing specific applies, rather than guessing at something wrong and specific.
- Correct the type if the use changes later — it costs nothing to update, and it keeps the drawing honest.