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After many years of designing houses for clients as well as
my wife and I, one thing was apparent, there is no one type person or
couple who are interested in the Design of a New Home.
The only common thread with everyone was that plan books just never hit the
design head square on. Instead people range from:
-
the I
want to ‘control every detail and step’,
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to
the hands off; ‘just give me the essence of what I want’.
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And
to every where in between.
The second thing
we clearly discovered was the lack of good
design guides. There is a lot of material on styles, decorating and aesthetics
but for some reason we saw little practical design help presented efficiently.
Usually there were wads of glossy photos and never ending hubris with minimum
practicality, So------
I decided I would like to help
fill some of the void and hopefully motivate many of you to get involved in the
design substance of a new house rather than the frivolous.
Then on the flip side, I do not want anyone to be misled into thinking
"Home Sweet Home Design" will talk about house styles, aesthetics
and decorating.
Let’s start off with
What
This Book Is And What This Book Is
Not.
What This Book Is-
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It is a somewhat ordered
compilation of tips, lessons, and advice by someone who has been through it
many times.
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It has information to help a
wide range of people regardless if you wish to design the entire house
yourselves, only understand and possibly guide others you hire,
or perhaps you just want to dabble.
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It has a Green focus.
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The book looks at both your
land and the house.
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It considers only the single
family detached home, although much can be applied to the planning of any
residential situation.
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The book considers design as
a unification of all of the house components; mechanical, electrical and
plumbing as well as the floor plan and ‘shell’.
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It attempts to Illuminate
the complexity of serious design.
What This Book Is Not—
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The book is not a
comprehensive step by step design manual. (way too big a subject)
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The book is not a
construction manual or how to build book.
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We will never mention the
term house ‘style’.
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The topics of ‘beauty’,
proportion, etc. while important are beyond the scope of this book and must
be found elsewhere.
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The book does not separate
Design from engineering.
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It does not cover design of
attached housing or anything multi family.
- It is not
a glossy design picture book.
A word about design vs. construction. Above I say this book is NOT a construction manual.
This is important to make clear since the two do intermingle in a vague manner.
Let it be said that to do a respectable job of either subject takes a book
by itself for each. There are books out there who claim (by title at least) to
do both. What you will find is a lot of charts and figures with either poor
explanation or explanation of the obvious. As a result, this book is going to
disregard the majority of information that falls into the realm of construction
unless it effects your ability to do or understand a design subject.
The caveat though is: please do not think understanding construction is not
important. On the contrary, it is very important, just impractical in one book.
I will though provide reference to construction manuals
periodically through the book.
A
Word About The Old Worn Way.
You will find significant
attention devoted in this book to your site/lot/land. (What ever you
choose to call your piece of heaven on earth). For urbanites and
dense suburbanites (no pun intended), or those building in tightly regulated
suburban developments much of this will be mute. Skim it never the less, you
might find something that will pop up useful along the way. You never know.
One of the reasons for the
book’s attention to the land is the strangle hold American single family housing
has put on our thinking.
Chapter 5 – Your Site Talks First will
try changing this. I think the chapter title speaks for itself, so no more will
be said here, other than: if one of your motives for being involved in the
design of your house is Green keep in mind
your site has more effective green potential than all the green materials, etc.
inside your home itself.
You
& Preconceptions
Many may be annoyed at what I am going to say next, but if you are
sincerely interested in improving the design of your new home I hope you will bear
with this.
You may be your worst enemy
in achieving an attractively designed home.
Lets face it, there are those of
us that have good sense of design and those of us who do not. If you are of the
former all the more power to you, but if you are of the latter, beware. Let me
list some observations on this point and then let it go with a word of advice-
know yourself.
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Of all the people whom I’ve
worked with the ones with the absolutely worst design sense seemed to
be the ones who insisted on being the complete authors.
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Remember your tastes and
design sense when you were a child or teenager? Design, like learning
anything, is an ongoing, evolving of skill and ‘sense’. Take care that what you
see as great today doesn’t end up ugly or impractical in 5
years. You might be stuck with it. A few words to the wise come to mind:
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Keep it simple.
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Too much icing kills the
cake.
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Continuity and integration
are good starting and ending places.
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Everyone who has
shopped for a house has seen homes that were laid out oddly or
looked bizarre. This is usually the result of the original owner making the
house too personal and having a, lets say, unsophisticated
understanding of what they were doing. Its one thing to have a floor plan that
reflects your life style it is another if that life style of the moment
doesn’t work for other human beings on earth. (Keep in mind resale even
if it is your children reselling after you pass on).
How about one last antidote.
You remember those ‘do
everything clients’ I mentioned above? The ones with the worst designs? Almost
all (just almost, not every single one) had heavy duty preconceptions of what
they wanted their house to look like. Not how well it worked, not
the practicality or how realistic it was but how it looked. Further, rarely was
the ‘look’ a unified one. The most common tendency was to have seen parts of
houses that the person liked and wanted in their home. Photos in magazines were
cut out. The design of the home constituted stitching these stage sets
together and surrounding it with a shell. Naturally parts of the shell were
different because these needed to correspond to those photos. So, instead of an
attractive house, a Disneyland of fakery is achieved. Now please do not get me
wrong. If a Disneyland is what you really want, so be it! But do not kid
yourself that you are doing good design work.
Instead—
I am afraid to say this. I can
almost hear you! BUT the photo scrape book (PSB) of preconceptions is the exact
opposite of good design. PSB only makes it more difficult to arrive at a home
that meets your needs and is attractive. For some reason that maybe
psychologists can explain preconceptions put your brain into a lockdown that
will cause not only the lack of creativity but often the lack of common sense as
well! The PSB lockdown might very well lead you down several bad roads,
such as:
- Designs you can not afford.
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Missing practical problems
that otherwise would have been caught.
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Not discovering a great
design idea because it doesn’t correspond.
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Loosing good design help and
advice from others.
These roads
will be discussed further in coming Chapters.
To end, here is a simple rule; good Design of Your Own Home stems from a hierarchy of needs resolved
through practical constraints and limitations. These needs are seldom solved through preconceived appearances,
instead the solutions are made more complicated.
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