The talented Evan Coury created a module that allows you to specify alternative layouts to use for each module.
I forked Evan's module and extended it to allow layouts per action as well as per module. This way if one of your controller actions needs a different layout for example a large table, you can set a different layout template for it.

Get the module at my Github: https://github.com/ericpaige/EdpModuleLayouts

module/EdpModuleLayouts/Module.php