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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    Hawaii is over five thousand miles from my office. But when a relative of a previous client called me from Tokyo and asked if I would be interested in doing a project in Hawaii, how could I say “no?” I met the property owners at the beachfront site on Oahu and we agreed to work together. These days, with e-mail, digital cameras, the internet, and overnight delivery, moving information long distances is easy. I made many trips to Hawaii for design meetings, site visits, and contractor meetings, but the process went along in much the same way as it would have if it had been an hour’s drive from my office.

Balinese Style House in Hawaii from Designing Your Perfect House

     When I travelled to the islands, I would often stay for a week or so. I took along my laptop and worked on my other projects while not attending to the business of the Hawaii project. So my local work progressed as it normally would. The whole experience was great fun, especially the two week trip to Bali to buy antique doors, stone carvings, and other items, as well as study Balinese architecture. My client wanted a Bali themed design. I learned a lot about Balinese architecture through reading, but this first-hand look at some of the iconic buildings, resorts, and the traditions that generated the distinctive forms were tremendously valuable.

    A builder can not work at such long distances as easily. His work requires much closer contact and day to day management. But an architect does a lot of his work in his office or studio and only needs periodic visits. I have designed houses in many states and I am always looking forward to new and interesting challenges and experiences. So please feel free to contact me if you are thinking of designing and building a house anywhere at all, especially if it’s a warm, tropical climate. We’ll plan our site meetings for the wintertime.

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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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I’ve been perplexed by this issue and I’ve found that it is very difficult to find dependable information on this subject. Part of the reason for this lack of good information is that no one really knows answers with any scientific foundation. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and based on that research, I’ve come to the following conclusions. As you read these, please keep in mind that I am also among the legions of mold non-experts who have voiced their opinions on the subject. But this information was taken from what I thought were reliable sources. Hopefully this will put the mold issue into perspective.

1. You can not eliminate mold in your house. It is always there. So the best recommendation is to control the moisture in the house by keeping the relative humidity between 30% and 60%. Mold needs moisture and it will grow when the relative humidity is above 60% to 65%. Surfaces that have condensation appear on them will be more prone to growing mold because condensation is 100% humidity, of course.
2. There are over 60,000 known types of mold. Only a few are known toxins. The huge majority of them are benign or their effects are unknown. And they live everywhere around us all the time.
3. Testing for mold has a limited value since nearly every test will show some mold. Even the spore count can be deceiving depending on the reproductive cycle of the mold. Some tests can show large releases only to be followed by extended periods of dormancy. Testing should be done on the outside of the house as a point of comparison. It is possible that similar levels of mold exist all around and the amount found in the crawlspace do not represent anything abnormal. Even the State of California Department of Health does not recommend testing for mold contamination because of the lack of standards for judging what is an acceptable quantity of mold! From what I’ve read, the only way to know if you have too much mold is if you can smell it or see it. Even then, the odds are highly in your favor that the mold you smell is not harmful since the vast majority of mold is not harmful.
4. Most molds produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that become airborne and smell musty. These are offensive, but are not thought to cause illness. Some molds, at certain times do produce toxic chemicals called mycotoxins. If inhaled in sufficient quantities, some people can get sick from these. But this is not an established risk for healthy people. It is more likely in people with weakened immune systems.
5. Molds can trigger asthma attacks or hay fever, but there is no proof that molds cause these ailments. The only cases of molds causing infections in humans are rare and only occur in people with a weakened immune system.
6. Mold can grow on any surface. Metals and other non-porous surfaces are just easier to keep clean than surfaces like wood or paper. However some metals, like copper and zinc form a fungicide when they oxidize. That is why better asphalt shingles are made with zinc granules in with the stone granules to prevent the fungus streaks you often see on roofs in the South. Copper or zinc ridge strips were often used for this purpose, too. But metal duct systems can be easily cleaned and disinfected.
7. Mold can germinate, or “bloom” in as little as twelve hours and start to grow in a day or two. So weekly monitoring is essentially useless. If the moisture is too high, mold will get ahead of you really fast.
8. There are tons of alarmist stories and law suits out there right now so it’s about impossible to sort out the truth. That’s because no one seems to really know the truth.
9. Lawsuits regarding mold almost always point to the builder unless there is some demonstrated neglect by the owners, such as allowing a leak to go unfixed. However, improper detailing can leave architects and engineers with a legal exposure, too. No matter the situation, it is very hard to determine fault with any accuracy since there are many sources of moisture entering a house and because of the lack of scientific data, the damage due to mold is hard to quantify. Still, many of the judgments awarded in mold lawsuits are based on sympathy for the homeowner and not actual facts like many fantastic lawsuits these days.
10. The longer a house is under construction prior to the roof going on and getting the house “dried in”, the more susceptible it will be to mold. Work should proceed expeditiously to let the house get dry as quickly as possible.
11. The greatest risk of mold growth actually occurs during the cooler months when the relative humidity remains above 90% for sustained periods. That would be a day like we had on Wednesday when everything seems to have condensation on it. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but during the high humidity, hot days in the summer, the relative humidity is actually lower than those damp days in the winter. This is because warm air can hold more grains of moisture and the surfaces are warmer and the dewpoint is not reached to cause condensation. Cooler surfaces cause condensation, not warmer ones.
12. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Guidelines on Assessment and Remediation of Fungi in Indoor Environments (2002) is the most widely recognized guide for remediation.
13. One interesting thing I have learned is that mold will not grow on lumber with a moisture content below 20%. And even then, the wood must remain sufficiently wet for approximately seven days.
14. Your yard (and mine) is loaded with mold. Everyone’s is except maybe in Arizona. Even there the spores probably exist, just waiting for a little moisture.

The bottom line is this. Your builder should warrant the health of the house he is turning over to you. However, I don’t know that there is any way he can really certify this since there is no “standard” in the industry. So a measure of reasonableness is required. The mere presence of mold is not a cause for alarm. But a large and visible outbreak of mold needs to be dealt with in a level-headed way. A well-educated builder is the first step in preventing mold. Controlling moisture is the primary mission. If you do that, you will control mold in your house.

If you want another perspective on the validity of the mold health issue, you might find this article, The Mold Scare: Medical facts versus dubious myths, by Gailen D. Marshall Jr., the director of the Allergy & Clinical Immunology Division at The University of Texas Medical School-Houston interesting and enlightening.

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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.

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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    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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