How to fix your open floor plan now that the trend is over, according to interior designers

• Open-concept floor plans are becoming less popular.
• Insider spoke to home-decor experts about how to break up open spaces.

Open-concept floor plans have become a staple of modern home design, appearing on home-improvement shows and home influencers' social-media pages constantly.

But consumers have actually been less interested in the trend in recent months and are instead craving more distinct spaces in the home.

Insider spoke to interior-design experts about why the change is happening and how people can create more distinction in their spaces.

Open-concept spaces are becoming less popular

Professionals in the design world point to the pandemic as the reason behind the shift away from open-concept homes.

"We love that sense of openness and airiness, and yet when we were all stuck in our homes all the time with our significant others, we all kind of had that sense of, 'How do you carve out privacy and a sense of your own space in a home?'" Heather Goerzen, the director of content and design at Havenly, a company that partners people with interior designers, told Insider.

"All of our homes that became one big open room were suddenly not conducive to living," Rachel Stults, the managing editor at Realtor.com, echoed to Insider. "It created a desire to have a defined space, or at least the ability to close one off if you need to."

As such, many people are craving more definition in their homes, with some going as far as literally building new rooms.

"We have seen people put up more definition if they can by putting up walls or looking for homes that have a closed-off kitchen or a closed-off dining room," Stults went on to say.

Dan Mazzarini, the creative director at BHDM Design and an expert in both interior design and home staging, told Insider it was particularly important to think about how to break up your open-concept space if you're staging your home for sale, as you want to show potential buyers the multitude of ways they can use the area.

"You might have used your house one way, but ask your broker for their point of view about what people are looking for in this kind of market and in that kind of open-concept space," he said.

But if you don't want to move or physically add walls to your home, there are plenty of ways to break up your space using decor accessories or furniture you already have, as the designers told Insider.

The key to breaking up your open space is focusing on function

When breaking up an open-concept home, you want to visually display that different parts of the space can have different functions, Mazzarini told Insider.

"People need to understand how they can use the space," he said.

The designers said one easy way to create separate areas within an open-concept home was to use the furniture to literally break it up.

For instance, instead of placing your couch against a wall, you can put it in the center of a room to separate it from the dining area, or you can use a console table to act as a barrier that breaks up the living area and the kitchen.

Goerzen said you could also show different functions in a room by using rugs to delineate space.

"A different corresponding or complementary rug in your living space versus your dining space can kind of anchor those two," she said.

If you want more separation, Goerzen recommended using furniture with more height, such as a bookshelf or even a folding screen, to create privacy within spaces.

Focus on what you want the different parts of the room to do, and you'll end up with a more-thought-out space.