Modern Farmhouse Plan Review: 3,966 Sqft, 4–6 Bedrooms, Main-Floor Primary

Floor plans: where the 3,966 sqft goes

Main Floor

Second Floor

Optional Finished Basement

The main floor is 2,485 sqft — large by my standards, but the program reads more disciplined than the square-footage number suggests. Walk in through the covered porch and the home office sits on your immediate left, with a closet that can take a wall of file storage or, in a household that does not need a true office, fold back to a fifth main-floor flex room for guests. Past the entry, the floor opens into a two-story great room under the gable, with the kitchen and dining flowing off the rear. The dining space connects to a deep covered patio through a slider — this is the heart of the plan and the room I would orient the building around when siting on the lot. Aim that patio south or southwest on a PNW or Mountain West site and you have an outdoor room that earns its concrete from April to October.

The kitchen runs an L with a large island parallel to the dining table — the island is the prep zone, the perimeter has the wall ovens and the cooktop. Behind the kitchen sits the service spine: walk-in pantry, mudroom with locker run, laundry, and the door to the tandem garage. This is the part of the plan I keep returning to. A locker run between mudroom and laundry is the single highest-impact storage move in a family home — boots, jackets, schoolbags, and sports gear stop landing on the kitchen island the moment you give them a wall of their own. If the design has a signature it lives in this sequence.

The primary suite is in the opposite rear corner from the kids’ wing — separated from the great room by the entry foyer and protected from foot traffic. Walk-in closet is substantial (I would estimate roughly 10 × 8 from the drawing scale), bath has a separate tub and shower, double vanity, and the water closet is partitioned. Main-floor primary suites are the single biggest accessibility move you can make in a family plan, and the fact that this one sits on a slab-or-stem-wall foundation means the path from the front door to the bed is essentially zero steps — which matters more at year 25 of ownership than at year one. If you have read my review of the single-story modern farmhouse with split bedroom layout, you will recognize the logic — except here you get the kid wing on its own floor instead of at the other end of the slab.

Upstairs is 1,481 sqft and houses three bedrooms — one with its own en-suite, two sharing a Jack-and-Jill — plus a central loft that overlooks the great room. The loft is the room I would interrogate first. As drawn it is a soft “kids’ lounge” zone, which is useful in year three of ownership and decorative in year fifteen. If I were customizing the plan, I would close that loft off as a fourth upstairs bedroom or a real study — it is roughly 200 sqft and currently performs less work per foot than any other space in the house. The Jack-and-Jill arrangement also deserves attention: it works in the early-elementary years and gets contentious in the middle-school years. I would price a small modification to give one of those two bedrooms its own three-quarter bath if your kids are within five years of each other and the budget allows.

The basement is 2,341 sqft unfinished. Architectural Designs sells it both ways, and I would price both before deciding. Finished, you gain two more bedrooms with closets, a generous family room with a wet-bar snack kitchen, an exercise room, and bulk storage — the path from “4-bedroom family home” to “6-bedroom multi-generational compound” without changing the building footprint. Unfinished, you keep the optionality of finishing it in five years (or never), and you knock $280,000 to $420,000 off the upfront build cost in PNW dollars. My honest recommendation: rough-in the basement bathroom, the snack-kitchen plumbing, and a separate basement HVAC zone during the initial build, then finish the rest when the kids are tall enough to need it. The rough-in is cheap during construction and impossible later.

Exterior: the Modern Farmhouse silhouette

The building footprint is 76 feet wide by 73 feet 11 inches deep, with the roof topping out at 31 feet. Primary gables run 8/12, secondary roof planes at 6/12. That is a meaningful pitch — about as steep as you can go before truss design and shingle wind-rating start adding real cost — and it is the move that pulls the building out of “suburban builder” territory and into the Modern Farmhouse vernacular. The steep gables are doing the visual heavy lifting; everything else (cladding, window frames, garage doors) is dressing the geometry.

The featured façade pairs white painted brick at the lower courses with dark vertical board-and-batten on the upper portions and gables. Black double-hung and casement windows, dark architectural shingle roof, frosted-glass-paneled garage doors. The combination is photographing well in 2026 and selling well at resale in suburban and rural-suburban PNW markets — I see it across Bend, Boise, and the Salt Lake corridor on every new family-home build. The risk with high-contrast farmhouse is that it dates fast: the all-white-with-black-window phase peaked around 2022, and the warmer wood-and-stone variations I will walk through in the façade section are the directions I would push a client toward if they want this plan to still photograph well in 2035.

Notable structural specs: 2×4 exterior walls (not 2×6, which surprised me for a plan this size — confirmed with the listing). Truss framing throughout the second floor and roof. The 2×4 wall is the spec I would change before pulling a permit. For roughly $4,000 to $7,000 in lumber and labor delta on a plan this size, you upgrade to 2×6 exterior walls, add R-23 dense-pack cellulose, and meet IECC Climate Zone 4C and 5B prescriptive requirements without exotic detailing. On a sub-2,000 sqft home I can argue either way; on a 3,966 sqft home where the heating bill scales with envelope area, 2×6 pays back in five to seven years anywhere from Bend north.

The rear elevation is where the design quietly delivers — a large covered patio across the dining-and-great-room zone, deep enough to be a real outdoor room, and a wall of windows that turns the great room into a daylit space all year. This is the elevation worth orienting toward the best view on the lot; the front of the building is doing curb-appeal work, but the rear is doing the lived-experience work.