Designing stairs is more intricate task than many people realize. And it’s not just about how the stairs look. Proper proportioning is critical to comfort and safety. Set the tread and riser sizes carefully. For  I recommend 10″ treads with a one inch nosing. The nosing is the projection forward of the tread beyond the riser below. The riser is the vertical portion of the step. I try to keep the riser height under 7 1/2“, preferring to end up with about 7 1/4″ if I can. We’re all getting a bit older and the fraction of an inch can really make a difference in how a staircase feels. On a house with the now fairly common ten foot ceilings, 18 risers will give you risers of about 7 1/3″. If you have a situation where you want to further reduce the riser height to fit a particular situation or if you have bad knees, you can go by the old “Rule of Thumb” that said the riser and tread dimensions, when added together, should equal 17.  So 6 1/2″ risers would be combined with 10 1/2″ treads for maximum comfort. But there are always exceptions to Rules of Thumb, of course.

Terms Used when Designing Stairs

    These riser and tread rules work well for staircases. When we approach a set of stairs, we unconsciously adjust our stride to begin our ascent or descent. But I have found that on interior stairs (or steps) between rooms or in hallways, where there are only two or three risers, people, tend to take the steps in a normal walking stride and will over-step the next tread down if it is too narrow. I have learned that ten inch treads are not wide enough for safety. I had this situation in my own house. I had twelve inch treads shown on the plans and the builder, a good friend and a good builder, mistakenly put in steps with ten inch treads. I let the mistake stand, feeling the cost of the correction was not worth it. But I was wrong. After several people fell, I had to call the builder back in and we changed the steps to the original 12″ treads. No one fell after that, even during parties!

    On exterior stairs, I feel 10″ treads are too narrow and 6″ risers are too tall. These stairs may be wet or covered with snow. The lighting might not be as good as indoors. So for outdoors steps, I make the treads 12″ and the risers between 6″ and 7″, with a preference toward the shorter dimension. If you are building a full staircase, say from a deck to the ground below. You can narrow the tread to 11″ and let the riser grow to 7 ¼”.

        Have you ever wondered why the nosing is there? Why not simply leave it out and make the steps easier to build? The nosing is actually required by the Building Code to make it safer to go down the stairs. When we step down to the next lower step, the ball of our foot touches first and then the heel goes down. If you experiment with your own foot, you will see that your heel will actually seem to go backward as it goes down. The nosing allows some clear space for your heel to drop. If the nosing was not there, your heel would hit the riser and you would stumble forward. Try filling in the space the tread creates with a book or one inch thick board and then step down the step again. Please hold the handrail for safety. You’ll see how your heel wants to catch on the riser and your loss of balance would pitch you forward.

    The real bottom line of all this discussion is to find some steps you feel are comfortable and then measure the treads and risers. If you do this you will quickly learn what dimensions are best for you.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

     People tend to not place enough emphasis on the lighting in their homes. It is often taken for granted and as a result, it is poorly designed.  There are lots of things you can do to reduce your electrical costs, improve the quality of the lighting in your home, avoid construction cost over-runs, and make your house more “green.”

      Natural day-lighting is something that has been under appreciated and undervalued in recent decades. But the current renewed concern about green building and high energy costs have changed that thinking. A good architect can help you orient your house properly on the land to maximize the benefits of free day-lighting without resulting in overheating of the house in summer months. In a well designed house, you should not have to turn on your electric lights during a sunny day. Simply placing windows on the southern walls (in a northern hemisphere site) will gain significant daylight, but the costs to cool the house will soar as the house will overheat badly. You will give up more energy money than you will save. Properly designed overhangs are needed, deciduous plantings, and sometimes shutters or shades can be used to maintain control over the natural lighting in your home. Indirect, reflected daylight is best. Direct sunlight is to be avoided. In addition to the heat gain direct sunlight can give, fabrics and carpets can fade under the intense rays of direct sunlight.

      There are many types of artificial lighting to choose from for your home. And without some training and experience, making the right selection can be tough. Fortunately there are many good lighting stores owned and operated by well trained, knowledgeable people. You can take advantage of their training and experience for free. Most of them will spend a considerable amount of time with you working out a lighting plan for your home, helping you select the best fixtures based on looks, style, type of light the fixture provides, cost of the fixtures, and energy efficiency.

      Having a good, well thought out lighting and electrical plan before you begin construction of your remodeling or new house construction project is one of the keys to controlling homebuilding costs. Costly extras often come from changes people make to the electrical work when they discover things they failed to consider before signing the contract with the builder. The more you can think through your electrical and home lighting plan, the more money you will save and the better lighting your new or remodeled home will have.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

      Do you want to control your homebuilding costs? Do you have electrical plans for your new house? Many stock plans show some electrical information, i.e. the location of switches, light fixtures and electrical outlets. Chances are this layout will not meet your needs, if you have a plan at all. One of the primary sources of homebuilding cost overruns is in the electrical work. If you do not have a well defined, complete plan that shows every switch, which lights each one controls, every electrical outlet, every telephone jack and every television jack, you will not have a guarantee that the contractor is planning on providing what you want in his contract price. I’ve seen people add numerous additional devices only to be shocked when the electrician tallies up the final total and presents the customers with a bill for the extras. Even if the cost is only $30 or $40 per device, they can add up fast and you’ll find yourself with thousands of dollars of homebuilding costs you never anticipated.

      Many electricians base their price on the number of junction boxes they install. Each switch, each electrical outlet and each light fixture counts as one box. So if you add an overhead light and a wall switch, this counts as two boxes. Usually, the location of the boxes does not matter. It is the number of boxes that is critical to your homebuilding costs.

      The preventive medicine to avoid this cost calamity is to have a good, well though through electrical plan drawn up prior to the builder preparing his price. Your architect or residential designer can help you with this. They can show you what you need and help you avoid “over-lighting” your house. Over-lighting is a real peril and can really add homebuilding costs quickly. Many times I see people put a light above the vanity in a powder room and also include a ceiling light. In real life, the light above the mirror will light the small powder room quite sufficiently. The ceiling light will never be used. Be sure every light is essential before you toss it in to the plan. These things add up. If you really want to control your homebuilding costs, you need to place lights with care.

      Also, try to avoid over-controlling the lights. It’s easy to start adding switches to control every light from every entry point to a room. Try to be prudent about this. You will want to provide what is called a lighted “path of travel.” This is a path that takes you through the house with switches along the way so you can turn on the light ahead of you and turn it off after you have passed. A simple example is a hallway with a switch at each end that operates the hall light. Rooms like dining rooms that have two entry points should have one of the light in the room operated from both entry points. These are called three-way switches in the construction world. But the other lights in the dining room do not have to have three way switches. Only place those switches near the primary entry point. If you come into the room from the other direction, you will have to walk across the room if you want to turn on the other lights, but you will save a lot of construction money by using this switching strategy in every room and you also won’t end up with a bunch of unsightly switches all across your walls.

      Control your lighting impulses and prepare a good lighting plan and you will gain control over your homebuilding costs.

Bill Hirsch AIA

www.williamhirsch.com

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

    Good design must have an organizing concept. But even with a good concept, a house can have all the right finishes, the best materials, the finest appliances, everything can be as perfect as it can be-and yet, the house still doesn’t feel right. Why doesn’t it feel like home?

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”-Philip Johnson     

    If you asked me to give you a short answer to the question, “What will make a house be my perfect house?” I would have to say this: Everything should just seem to be in the right place. Unfortunately, the word “seem” is pretty vague. So it follows that the characteristics that will create Your Perfect House are subjective, and the concepts are sometimes difficult to grasp. These are the immeasurable, unquantifiable aspects of architectural design.

    These issues relate to emotions and to other sorts of perceptions that can’t be described in feet and inches. It’s a little difficult to get your arms around the concepts we’re going to talk about, which may be the reason many books about designing homes do not even attempt to discuss them. But they are vital for you to be aware of so you can be a full partner with your architect in the design of Your Perfect House. I’ll elaborate upon them in future posts. But for now, here are a few key concepts that take a house beyond simple shelter and elevate it to the status of “home.” 

A Home Needs Sequential Progressions-Our Minds Seek Order

    We don’t like to go from silence directly to eardrum-shattering noise. We can’t stand turning on a bright light when our eyes have adjusted to the darkness. There has to be a gradual transition, a segue from one thing to another. It’s the same when we enter a house. We are most comfortable if the journey from the public spaces outside the front door progresses through a thoughtfully designed sequence of increasingly more private spaces, eventually ending at the most private spaces.  

Don’t Design a Building, Design Spaces

    Architects don’t simply design houses. We design spaces. The house is merely the enclosure and definition of those spaces, both inside and outside the house. We think in terms of spaces more than objects.

    When architects design houses, they are actually creating spaces within those houses that will work for the people who will be living in them. This is what a good architect is trained to understand. This is what he should have a sixth sense about. What will the spaces feel like? What size is right? What shape and character is best?

 Control the Scale-Keep It Human

    A room is a stage for human activity. Rooms become important because of what happens within their boundaries. Because the rooms in a house are meant to contain human activities, they should necessarily be sized to match the intended use and therefore always maintain a human scale.

    Architects always want to create spaces that match the function for the users. Let’s say that Joe down the street has a dining room that’s 14 by 16 feet. Fred wants to build a house that will be “even better” than Joe’s. Fred might say, “Hey, I don’t have to have a 14-by-16-foot dining room. I can afford a room that’s 20 by 24.” After all, isn’t bigger better? Not always, I say. An architect can help you discover the proper size and proportion a room should have to suit the function and the particular users of that room, just the same way a suit of clothes should fit the wearer perfectly or the clothing will feel awkward and wrong.

    Making a house a home is a matter of designing the spaces we live in and not simply erecting a building that will keep the water out and the heat inside. It’s about understanding scale, transitions, progressions, order, and aesthetics.

Bill Hirsch

www.williamhirsch.com

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

I recently was asked a question from a person in Philadelphia about how to deal with a very high ceiling in a living room. Here’s the question:

  My nineteen-eighties condo has a 19′ ceiling in the living room that merges with the dining area where the ceiling drops to eight feet. The 19′ fireplace wall is in the corner. Is there any way to make the scale of this 19′ tall room more human? I have purchased numerous original oil paintings that go almost to the ceiling on the wall opposite the French doors. I’m beginning to question this technique. I feel there is so much wasted space that I wanted to make it interesting rather than just filled with air.

Here’s my answer:

Your dilemma with the high ceiling is one that we often face when there is a second floor overlook or balcony into a living room or great room. I can see that you have an appreciation for this problem already.

This is not a new problem. Back in the days before air conditioning in houses, the ceilings in high end houses were often quite high to keep the room cooler in summer. Check out the George Read house on The Strand in New Castle, Delaware for an example. Hot air rises, after all. So they had to deal with this same issue. The solution you will sometimes see is to add a cornice type of moulding part way up the wall, maybe at the 9′ or 10′ level, paint the wall color up to that and then paint the ceiling color on the upper portion of the wall as well as on the ceiling. This would be a trick of the eye that would give the impression of a lower room because your eye and brain would tend to only perceive the color portion of the wall while the ceiling color portion would sort of vanish into the ceiling itself. This trick actually works.

On one house I designed we had to have a two story room because the owners wanted a music loft to overlook the room below. But we also wanted to control the visual height of the room. The room was about 20′ tall with windows on one wall toward the view. I designed an oversized cornice, kind of like a big mantel shelf, that I ran all the way around the room. It projected out from the wall maybe ten inches and was about fourteen inches tall. It was like a very big plate rail. I placed it about thirteen feet above the floor. The wall below the cornice was painted a color, not white. The wall above the cornice was painted a much lighter version of the wall color. Then there was another crown moulding where the wall met the ceiling. The ceiling was given more color to help bring it down. This worked pretty well. The cornice added a strong horizontal line that helped elongate the room. It’s sort of the same principle that applies when you wear horizontal striped clothing. It makes you look wider and shorter, although that’s not an effect most of us want.

 The whole idea is to give your eye a place to stop at the height you select. Although I can’t think of an example off the top of my head of a ready example, I’m sure you can walk around Philadelphia, or any other city, and see a number of buildings that have a cornice line up a story or two, visually defining a height that relates to the people on the street. But then the building continues up many more stories. This is the same principle being used to control the visual height.

I find that fewer and fewer of my clients want the really tall ceilings. Once they have lived with them, they see the down side. If a tall ceilinged room opens to the second floor, sound transmission can be another problem with sounds reflecting off the walls and echoing from one floor to another. Today’s trend seems to be a return to more human scaled rooms.

Bill Hirsch

www.williamhirsch.com

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

    Now is a great time to build! Builders are hungry, prices of many construction materials are low, and the vendors are making deals to get business. If you have the resources, don’t wait. Build now and capture the savings. Right now, Warren Buffett is buying U.S. stocks because he sees them as a low-priced opportunity. Construction costs represent the very same opportunity. You can cash in big time if you act now. 

    I got a note from a prospective client recently asking for my advice on what construction costs might be for a new house. They were in the early stages of planning and wanted to get an idea of how much their new house might cost. Here is my answer:

    I have recently had a house price out at $170 per foot and another as high as $275 per s.f. There are a lot of variable that can affect the cost, as you can imagine. The formula I use is to include all of the “heated” square feet. I do not count the garage and/or porches. This formula is sort of the industry standard. For budgeting purposes, I would suggest using $200 per s.f. as the low end and $250 as the higher end. Of course, it is possible to go considerably higher. The variability of cost is due to different exterior materials, the shape of the house, the appointments within the house, and the site considerations. But above $250 per s.f., the added cost is attributed to particular items, like very expensive cabinetry or particular site conditions, and things like that. It’s hard to get more definitive than that until the house is designed and those numerous variables are known.

    My suggestion for calculating your square footage is to list out the rooms and spaces you want, including staircases, closets and hallways, if you can. Then assign target sizes to those spaces. It can help to use your current house and its rooms as guidelines for the target room sizes. Then multiply out the areas of each room, total it up, and then add ten or fifteen percent to the total. That added percentage is to account for the area used up by the walls themselves. Three running feet of a typical interior wall takes up one square foot! And the percentage accounts for inefficiencies in the actual house layout. Not every room will end up exactly at the target size. Then multiply the total by $200 and also by $250. That should give you a high and low number and a feel for where your construction cost will be.

    Incidentally, when stating these costs of construction, I am including all of the sitework, like landscaping, driveway, irrigation, etc. These costs estimates also anticipate a three car garage, a front porch, a screened porch, and things like that. The figures also include all permits and inspection fees. They include everything that would be in you contract with the builder.

    I will say that right now is a terrific time to build because the marketplace is hungry and prices are good. Lumber is very low, vendors are anxious to make deals, and even the builders are trimming their markup to get projects signed up. I think that in a couple of years we will look back at today and say, “Wasn’t that a great time to build? Everything was such a bargain.” Once the economy improves, the prices will surely go up quickly. Now that oil prices are going back down, some of the materials that went up due to the very high oil prices, like shingles, will likely go down sometime soon because of the slowdown in demand for construction products.

    Take advantage of this Golden Opportunity to get your dream house built at a price you will never see again. The woes of Wall Street can be a bonanza for you.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    Garage doors are often one of the ugliest features on the exterior of a house. There are now quite a few “carriage house” type doors to choose from that look much better than the traditional flat or raised panel doors. But those special doors come at a significant cost increase. There are other solutions you might want to consider.

    Garage doors are often an unsightly feature simply because of their scale. We human beings tend to prefer objects that are an appropriate size or scale to our own size. The doors and windows of your house will be most appealing when they are size-appropriate to the people who will occupy the house. They will “express” an interaction with other people. On a subconscious level, we can emotionally connect with architectural features like that. Garage doors must, by their very nature, be sized and scaled to the automobiles that must pass through them. Garage doors end up being the largest doors on your house. We find them unattractive for that very reason.

    Being true to his sardonic nature, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant vines.” It’s a clever line, but vines can serve a greater purpose for architects than simply camouflaging errors. They can be useful elements that can be integrated into the architecture. Here is an example of vines used to soften the visual impact of three, blank garage doors in an otherwise featureless portion of a house.

Pergola with Vines above Garage Doors

    It’s almost impossible to discuss composition and architectural proportion without referring to the golden mean, also called the golden section. Readers of Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code may recall the description of that formula in the book. As a brief refresher, the golden mean is the original organizing and proportioning method or formula for art and architecture. Its theory tells us that human beings are most pleased when things are in a proportion of 1 to 1.618. In other words, if a window is one unit wide, it should be 1.618 units tall in order to be the most appealing to human eyes. The golden mean was used prominently in Greek and Roman architecture and is just as useful in today’s world. Indeed, the same ratio that was applied to the design of the Parthenon is likely to aid your architect in the design of your new home.

    The golden mean offers a comfortable proportion with which to work, but it’s not the only comfortable proportion, so you don’t have to feel locked into it. The intriguing thing about the golden mean, about placing things at this scale, is that it just about always works. Consider it a safety net for proportions.

     A bit of architectural trivia: A classic and pervasive curved shape used to this day in crown moldings, wood trims, and other architectural details is the “ogee” curve. The “ogee” is a direct derivative of the golden mean. This curve originates with the Greeks and shows up in the columns we place on our front porches, crown moldings we place in our living rooms, and even the curves that are shaped into the aluminum gutters outside our houses. Who knew that ancient Greek classical design would eventually create aluminum gutters?

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    In a high-end community where I have designed nearly one hundred houses, there are fairly strict house design guidelines. Covenants and restrictions are a necessary element in maintaining a level of quality, and thus, maintaining property values. No one is happy if a lime green house ends up next door. Design restrictions offer some limits, and as Martha Stewart says, that is a good thing.

    But some restrictions can go too far. One rule this community has is that every house must have a clearly displayed house number. That, in and of itself, is fine. Emergency vehicles need to be able to find the correct house, so I have no objection to that. But our Architectural Review Board has gone further and determined that only one style of house number is permitted. It is a bronze, somewhat traditional plaque with only one available font for the numerals.

    My objection has always been that the style of the house numbers should be compatible with the style of the house. A contemporary house would look odd with colonial numbers and vice versa. Today, the Chicago Tribune has an article on exactly this issue. It’s entitled Your house, by the numbers and was written by Mary G. Pepitone.

    I could not have expressed it better myself.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    By now, we are all familiar with the term, McMansion. Last year, work took me to Sedona, Arizona. While there, my clients escorted my wife and I on a tour of the local sights. Sedona is wonderfully beautiful. It is home of some of the most spectacular rock formations in the world. Many movies have been shot there and the existentialists gather frequently to experience the vortexes. I have to admit to a large amount of skepticism on those vortexes. Or is it vortecii? It’s been long time since high school Latin.

    One of our stops on the tour was the Chapel of the Holy Cross

Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, Arizona

     You can see how this interesting piece of architecture is designed to be integral to the rocks. It’s simplicity of form is inspiring. The architecture is minimal making its impact grand.

    But when you stand next to the Chapel of the Holy Cross and look out to the distant rock formations, this is what you see.

A McMansion in Sedona, Arizona

    Yes, it is the poster child for McMansions. Were they trying to mimic the rock formation? I just find this to be inexplicable. By the way, the dome in the center is an observatory that opens to let you view the night sky. But I might be wrong on that. It could actually be a vortex catcher!

    I’ll file this one away in the “more dollars than sense” department.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com