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.

    A woman came up to the signing table, thumbed through my book, Designing Your Perfect House, and complimented me on it. Then she asked, “Do you design houses that protect people from radio waves.” My answer was the same as yours probably would have been. Total silence. I had no idea what to say.

    Not put off by my dumbfounded look, she asked if I covered that topic in my book. Finding my voice, I said that I did not, but was terribly sorry for the careless omission of such an important matter. Of course, now my mind was racing wondering what peril she felt radio waves presented to body and mind. She volunteered an answer…I think. She said something about a friend who built a concrete house to keep his neighbor from doing some electronic mischief and fouling up his audio and computer system. I admit wasn’t paying close attention, though. While she was speaking, I was looking at a man adjusting the ear buds to his iPod and thinking of all of the radio waves that were zipping through my body at that very moment. Do you think some aluminum foil underwear and hat would help protect me?

   This peculiar conversation reminded me of a man I know of who outfitted his house with a master switch to sever all of the electricity from his house during the night so as to protect himself from electromagnetic fields while he slept. His paranoia prevented him from accepting the simple fact that if no lights or appliances are operating, there is no electric current in the wires and with no electric current there is no electromagnetic field being produced. Alas, science can not compete with hysteria, I suppose. Witness the persistent news stories of the dangers all around us. It seems that nothing is safe any more.

   Isn’t intense worry and anxiety debilitating to your health? Shouldn’t we be worried about being worried? And then they could worry about worrying about worrying, and so on and so on. It’s a downward spiral from there. Incidentally, my Mother has already gained world class status in worrying. You’ll be hard pressed to out-worry her.

    I welcome and comments or questions you might have. 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 think the best way to reduce your living space is to write out what we architects call a “program.” This is the first thing i do when doing a house design. This is a list of needs and desires plus a target size for the spaces you want. It’s a good idea to multiply out the areas of these rooms, include hallways, closets, stairs, and other small spaces and add them up to get a total. Take that total and multiply it by 1.15 to add 15% for the area the walls themselves take up. You’ll end up with the total square footage your house design will need to include all that you want. If this total is too much, go back and reevaluate what rooms and spaces you included. Trim out the excess. I discuss this process at length in my book, Designing Your Perfect House. A good, well thought out program will become your road map to the right sized house design.

     When reevaluating your programmed spaces, it’s a good idea to try to double up usages of rooms. Try to imagine dual purposes for the same areas. Maybe one of those guest rooms for occasional use by the grandchildren could double as a sewing room or office for your day to day living. Maybe you don’t need the formal living room and it could be replaced with a smaller library or even a reading nook. Do you need a separate formal dining room plus a breakfast area? Could those dining functions be combined? They probably can be, it’s simply a matter of how the space is designed and where it is located in the house design. A good architect can help you shrink the square footage without shrinking the house’s livability. Do we really need to keep all of the junk we seem to accumulate over the years? Could the guest room bath also serve as the powder room? Good house design is a matter of trimming the fat and keeping what is essential.

Try to think of how you really live and throw out the space you never or rarely use. Make your house design efficient. One great book that deals with the concept of living smaller and can help you with ideas is Sarah Susanka’s Not So Big House. I highly recommend it.

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

     Well, I don’t just guess. That can get you into trouble. In the early design stages, I depend on some rough cost-per-square-foot rule of thumb. I discuss how to calculate the square footage in my book, Designing Your Perfect House in some detail. This rule of thumb guideline will work for the initial preliminary design to at least get you in the ballpark. But before the work of finalizing the documents can be done, I talk to a builder who builds houses at the level my clients are expecting and ask him to give me a calculated estimate based on my preliminary plans, site plan, and elevations.

     This is still not a finite figure that can be used for a construction contract. But it is better than the early guess based on the cost per square foot. I ask him to give me a “bracketed” number. The low number is an amount that the cost of the house could not possibly be lower than without doing surgery (reductions or redesign) on the plan. The higher number is the amount we are unlikely to exceed unless we start selecting exotic things. This budget range could be as much as $200,000 on a large house. But I’ve found this to be helpful for my clients. If we are at the top of their budget with the builder’s low-end number, then it’s back to the drawing board. If it’s within the range, then we proceed, always cautiously, with our eyes open. If the budget is well above even the high number, which really never happens, we go have a party.

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

Probably the most important thing must do before even looking for floor plans is to write a “program” for your new house. Before architects begin a design, we write out a list of the required spaces or rooms, target room sizes, and desired characteristics and features for each room. This list is called the program. It is essential your goal for your house design. Lesson Eight in my book, Designing Your Perfect House, we discuss how to do this properly and effectively.

Writing a program is important so you will stay on track in your house plan search. If you don’t know your goal, you’ll never know if you’ve achieved it. With a good program, you will be able to choose between plans on a more detailed basis than simply how many bedrooms there are. For example, if you list in your program that you need morning sun in the kitchen, you will focus on floor plans that provide that and choose a building site that will allow the house to have the proper orientation that will place the kitchen on the eastern side of the lot so as to allow the morning sun to shine in.

This is simply one example. there are many other criteria you should be thinking about. If you develop a good program, you’ll end up with a good house.

Please look through the pages that explain my book , Designing Your Perfect House, and see if it might be helpful to you.

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      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.

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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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    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.

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