Luci wrote:

I know the correct answer for this, but I’d like to find out that it CAN be done differently – My husband and I will be building, (and by building I mean designing and having someone else build it) our retirement home in the near future, and I’ve found an “outside” that I like.  I don’t just like it, I want it!  I know you should design the floor plan first, then the outside, but I want to do it the other way around.  Any advice?

Thank you very much!

Luci

Here’s my answer:

Luci – Thanks for the good question. I have begun a number of projects with an image my client has found that captures the exact look they want. What we often do is to evaluate the plan of the house that has the “ideal” exterior and see how well that floor plan fits the program we’ve developed for the client’s Perfect House. Sometimes the plan can be simply adapted to suit my client’s needs. Sometimes it takes some clever redesigning to get things perfect. A good architect can even modify the exterior of the house to fit the revised floor plan and still retain the essence of the look of the house that captivated the client initially. The secret is that the exterior usually does not have to be a perfectly identical match to still look “just like” the exterior they had found and fallen in love with.

So don’t worry. Your Perfect House plan can usually be designed to give you Your Perfect House exterior look. It just takes some clever and creative thinking.

Best regards,

Bill

For more articles about home design, homebuilding, and remodeling, please visit my other site, www.about-home-design.com.

Shutters used to serve a functional purpose on a house. They were opened and closed regularly. Wooden shutters increased a home’s security when closed and allowed light and fresh air to enter the house when they were open. Shutters were usually closed and latched at night to make the home less susceptible to break ins. And, glass was very expensive. It needed to be protected during storms to prevent breakage and shutters served that purpose, too. Shutters were a key part of the function of the windows.

These days, windows are much more durable and we depend on security systems for home security. If you live in a hurricane prone area, you know the benefit of hurricane shutters. But normal window shutters are no longer used to protect windows. Shutters have grown to simply be a decorative feature on a house.

However, even if they are merely decorative, shutters should look like they could function. If they don’t they will simply look like a couple of panels screwed to the wall for no good reason. Giving the shutters the visual impression that they could operate properly will make the proportions of the window and shutter look correct and pleasing to the eye.

Shutters should be the same height as the window frame. The sash is the part that can open and close. It is the glass plus the wood that holds the glass. The frame is the next part of the window that the sash sits within. The shutter width should be half the overall width of the frame. If sized according to this rule. When the two shutters are closed over the window, they will neatly close over the complete window sash and frame.

Do not size the shutters smaller than the window frame or they will look silly. Operable shutters would never do their job of protecting the window if they did not completely close over it. So your fixed, decorative shutters shouldn’t look too small to fit over the window frame either.

Do not size them larger that the frame or they will look like if were closed they would lap over the window plus part of the wall and look just as silly. Some windows have an additional trim board around the window. Ignore this when measuring. A proper shutter should not lap over the exterior trim.

Shutters mounted with real hinges and shutter dogs always look best. The shutter dog is the piece of metal that holds the shutters back to the wall and is usually shaped like the letter “S” . But mounting shutters this way adds significant cost and this subtle detail may not fit within your budget. But you can always afford to get the size right, even if the shutters are purely for decoration and permanently screwed to the wall. All it takes is a bit of thought, planning, and a tape measure.

For more articles on Home Building and Remodeling, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

In a recent blog post by Clem Labine, publisher of Traditional Building magazine and Period Homes magazine, takes on the topic. Here’s a little of what he had to say in his post entitled Hard-Edged Houses for Those Who Love Machines:

Modernist architects once again are trying to sell hard-edged houses to the American public. A new home plan service called Hometta has been set up to offer “modern homes for the masses.” Hometta is a collaboration of several architectural studios whose goal is to provide “small, sleek, sustainable, affordable house plans for middle-class buyers.” Few would quibble with the goals of “small” or “affordable” or “sustainable.” Whether the market will applaud their version of “sleek” and “modern” remains to be seen.

His suspicion of how the public will receive the modernist offerings is shared by me. If you were to poll the public you would find a strong majority favoring houses that match their image of “home.” By that I mean a house with a pitched roof, windows of a human scale, comfortable places for comfy furniture, and not a house that looks like a museum for modern art.

I like to believe that a home-like house can be created in a modern or contemporary style. But nearly every modern house I’ve seen recently is not homey and would not even qualify as good modern design. Last year I was attending an architectural conference in Charleston and we took a tour of “significant houses” in the area. Much to my disappointment we did not visit any houses that were traditional. One after another they were severe, unfriendly and hard-edged. Clem Labine would have hated them. In my book, Designing Your Perfect House, I discuss how to “people” spaces. What I mean by peopling is making the spaces feel right for people to occupy and feel like you would expect people to be there now or soon. This has everything to do with providing the proper scale, materials that are indicative of requiring the human touch, and places where people fit properly.

Modernist house in the Charleston area. This is actually the front side that greets the owners and visitors when they arrive. Not only is the scale, use of materials, and form unappealing to human beings, there is no sense of arrival and the front door is totally invisible. The purplish material is oxidizing copper.

Later in his article, Clem Labine compares the Katrina Cottages by Steve Mouzon to the modernist houses and claims they are meeting the sustainability, cost, and size goals the modernist houses strive for, yet the Katrina Cottages also meet the goal of feeling like “house” and “home” to everyday people (like me). He says:

Ironically, the Katrina Cottages designed by Steve Mouzon offers the emotional reassurance of traditional architecture – but is actually the product of technology and the machine. The cottage is a low-cost modular house designed to be “small, affordable and sustainable.” But rather than an in-your-face declaration of machine-love like the Binary House, the Katrina Cottage offers the softer outlines of traditional architecture and conveys the aura of hand-built houses.

KATRINA COTTAGE VIII by Steve Mouzon/Housing International, Miami Beach, FL

I posted a comment of my own:

Clem – You’re right on the mark. I was trained in a Modernist philosophy, like most architects these days. We get heavily indoctrinated in the mantra that anything traditional must be rejected and modern is the only proper architectural language. I agree with Bob’s comment (author of an earlier comment than mine) that this kind of thinking ignores the lessons learned over the years about how to deal with rain, sun, wind, etc. But more importantly, strict modernism ignores the psychological lessons that are a part of our culture and grown within the human experience. It is pure vanity on the part of architects to say that all that has come before was wrong and only we, the modern architects, can create the forms that properly respond to mankind.

I think that this kind of attitude hinders our profession and is a disservice to the public. I wrote my book, Designing Your Perfect House precisely to empower homeowners and clients to help them understand why they feel the way they do about their houses and help them understand that they can ask for more than what’s on the architect’s menu. The solution to the blight in house design is not simply convincing the architects to do better, but to help the public feel more confident to demand better.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

And just what’s so appealing about a Sub Zero? Obviously it is a very good product. They have great features such as two individual compressors, one for the freezer side and one for the refrigerator side. Many of their super deluxe models have specialty features you probably didn’t even know you needed until they told you. But I think the single most valuable feature of a Sub Zero is the fact that it is “cabinet depth.” This means the front of the refrigerator sits even with the face of the lower cabinets and front edge of the countertop. It doesn’t stick out several inches like standard refrigerators and look like a big bulky box in the kitchen. With a cabinet panel installed on the doors of the Sub Zero, the bulkiest object in the kitchen, the refrigerator, can take a less intrusive position in your kitchen and give the entire kitchen a more unitized and cleaner look.

Sub Zero isn’t the only manufacturer of cabinet depth refrigerators. GE Monogram, Liebherr, LG, and a few other manufacturers now offer cabinet depth refrigerators. However, cabinet depth refrigerators are usually fairly expensive and many people feel they lack enough depth inside to be as useful to them as they might prefer.

Is there another solution? Fortunately there is. If the layout of the kitchen and the rooms the kitchen adjoins will allow it, a recess can be created in the wall behind the refrigerator to allow a standard depth refrigerator to be pushed back further than normal. A six inch deep recess in the wall (only behind the refrigerator and not behind the other cabinets) should allow you to tuck the unit back and keep the refrigerator door approximately even with the base cabinets. Choose a refrigerator that allows you to put cabinet panels on the front and install vertical cabinet panels on each side of the space for the refrigerator to create an alcove for the refrigerator. When you slide the fridge into place, it will be nearly identical in appearance to the expensive cabinet depth variety. You can get the good look of a built in while keeping the interior depth of a standard refrigerator and save a few thousand dollars in the process.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

You might not know exactly what I mean by a “good house form.” We architects often use the word “massing.” This refers to the overall shape and bulk of a building. It’s the shape of the structure and roof line in its gross form. It ignores the finer details. It relates to composition, balance, visual flow and a lot of other artistic terms that even professionals have trouble expressing in words. But a good house form is one we know when we see it. One way to evaluate a house form is to stand back and squint at it. This will keep the details from confusing your mind. A good house starts with a good house form. The details will further enhance it, making it even better. But it’s hard to save a bad form with expensive materials and details. A house has to have “good bones.”

Here's a house that caught my attention recently.

I drive by this house frequently and every time I find myself giving it a good look. So one day I stopped and took this picture so I could see it in more detail without driving into a ditch. What’s very curious about it is that it breaks many of the “rules” of design. You could call it a little squat and inelegant. You could criticize the arbitrary gable that was placed on the front. Most of us would have been compelled to center the front door below this gable and certainly add another window in the center on the second level to help make the gable “frame” some other elements. You could say that the portico is skimpy and the gingerbread ornamentation is contrived. You could even say that the paint scheme is a bit cutesy.  And you would be correct on all counts.

But don’t the heavy chimneys frame the house nicely? Doesn’t the gable-topped bay around the side of the house complement the one on the front wall, bringing the side porch into the composition and forcing you to look at the house in three dimensions? And did you even notice the complete lack of foundation planting? The only real landscaping are the two large, flanking trees. But even in winter with leafless trees, doesn’t this house simply “feel” good?

Just as in this house, good house forms are much more than the sum of their parts. They are a synthesis of many things. And they often ignore the rules with pleasing results. These are some of the intangibles you need to consider when Designing Your Perfect House.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

 When the flakes stopped falling, we had about six inches of nice, clean snow on the ground. I put on my tennis shoes (I don’t have boots anymore since I moved south) and found my gloves (they were in my golf bag where I left them following a chillier than usual round a few weeks ago) and set out to clear the snow. I don’t use a snow shovel any more. I’m not sure I still have one. I use my leaf blower, instead. It works surprisingly well. It fluffs up the snow and blows it away almost without a trace. I cleared my sizeable driveway in a little over an hour. The best part is my back doesn’t hurt! 

But here’s the reason I’m writing this post. No sooner had I gotten most of the snow off of the concrete, it started to melt. The air temperature was only twenty seven degrees. The sky was cloudy. But enough solar (radiant) energy still filtered through the clouds, was absorbed by the concrete, and was converted into heat to efficiently melt the dark ice that remained. Here was a perfect example of Passive Solar Design. It’s called “passive” because no mechanical systems are required. It just simply happens. As you might imagine, the portions of my driveway that sit in the shade did not melt. But the totally free energy from the sun did the job for me elsewhere.

 Shouldn’t your house be designed to take advantage of this free energy? I discuss this in more detail in my book, Designing Your Perfect House. If a house is designed properly, the sun’s energy will be kept out in the summer by the use of properly sized roof overhangs. You don’t need expensive solar collectors, photovoltaic panels, pumps, batteries or anything. Simple, thoughtful design will make your house energy efficient. A good architect or residential designer can do this for you. And if you live where you might get snow, be sure your driveway is on the sunny side of the house.

 Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

Illustration from Page 180 in Designing Your Perfect House

    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.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    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

    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?

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.

    I talked yesterday about the value of painting out larger samples of your wall and trim paint selections to verify that the colors were right. The same principles applies to the other materials you plan to use. Don’t pick bricks from a photo or even from a brick sample card with several thin bricks on it. Without mortar, the bricks will look different than they will on your house. Stone is even tougher. I can’t imagine being confident in a stone selection from a handful of loose stones. Stones come in a very wide range of colors, textures, and sizes. And there is no good way to describe stone in words. Photos of other walls help, but you need to be sure your builder can reproduce the wall you want.

    Insist that your builder construct a sample wall where you can see the “real” finished product.

Homebuilding Stone Samples

    In this photo, the stone mason has laid up three sample panels with several mortar joint options. You cans see two of them in this closer view.

Mortar Joints in a Stone Wall

    The top joint is called a “raked” joint. The mortar has been scraped back to let the edges of the stones show more. The lower joint is a brushed joint where the mortar is flush with the face of the stone and brushed somewhat smooth with a bristle brush. You can see that the effects are remarkably different.

    Simply picking the brick or stone for your house is not enough information for you to give your builder. It leaves too much to the imagination. You need to decide upon the color of the mortar, the way the mortar is “struck” or “tooled,” and you need to be sure you, your architect, the builder, and the mason all have the same image in mind for the final wall. The only sure-fire way to do this is to lay up a sample wall and create a physical sample. If the first samples don’t capture the look you want, pull it down and try again. The small cost of doing this will save you thousands in unnecessary cost, not to mention the aggravation and angst of getting the wall wrong.

Click on the comment bar to tell us your story.

If you would like to read more articles about house and home design, please visit my other website, www.about-home-design.com.