But, there are places in Your Perfect House where a nine or ten foot ceiling might be too high. Small rooms, such as bathrooms might feel uncomfortable with a high ceiling. A ten foot high ceiling in a five foot by six foot powder room can make the space feel like an empty elevator shaft. Your dining room is a room I call a “sit down” room. When you are seated at a table, high ceilings can be just as uncomfortable as a ceiling that is too low. Frank Lloyd Wright used low ceilings to great effect, often enhancing the drama of nearby higher  through the contrast of heights from space to space. He used lower ceilings to create a sense of intimacy.

Obviously, the ceiling of one floor is the floor of the next one above, so it’s impractical to have the second floor step up and down just to create varied height ceilings on the first floor below. But there is nothing stopping you from framing down a lower ceiling in the spaces that can’t handle the height. Think about lowering the ceilings in bathrooms and powder rooms. Consider framing down the perimeter of your dining room to create a tray ceiling that defines the space where the table will sit. Tray ceilings can make a large bedroom feel more cozy.

And on a very practical note, think about framing down the shower ceilings to eight feet. This will make the shower warmer, since it will hold in the warm, moist air better while you are showering. It also will reduce the cost of tiling the walls all the way to the ceiling because there will be less wall to cover.

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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.

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  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.

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