Here, this makes it clearer. This is the house as-is. The purple walls are the partition walls.
This is roughly what I’m thinking of doing. The green is the coffee counter. The lower flight of stairs gets moved to hug the wall. I don’t know why the original stairs came down smack in the middle of the foyer, but that is the original location. Maybe it was “showy”. This was a pretty nice house back in 1908. The green wall along the stairs probably won’t be a solid wall, but some sort of screen.
