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.

    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?

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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.

    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.

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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.

    If you don’t believe me, try this little test. Go to the paint store, or your local Home Depot, and pick up a few color chips of paint. Be sure to get two of each color. When you get home, cut out the colors so that no white edges show. All you should have left is is small piece of paper with the color on it. Then place one of the chips on a white piece of paper and the other chip on some other color paper. Stand back and look at them. Do the colors look the same? I’ll bet they don’t.

    Color is influenced by its context. If you try to make your color selections standing in the paint store and you only look at the color as it’s shown on the sample card, which likely will have a white background, you may miss the subtle hues, only to notice them later when the entire house is painted and changing the color will cost you plenty.

    And speaking of hues, there is really no such thing as white. There are many colors of white. I know that sounds silly. After all, white is a color we can all identify. But actually there are many whites, each with its own unique underlying tone. A true white would be something along the lines of “copy paper” white, but even that may have a bluish cast when held up against a white with an underlying hint of yellow. There are “pinkish” whites, “greyish” whites, very, very pale yellows, and many more.

    You will have trouble seeing these nuances in a tiny paint chip. It is necessary to paint a larger sample wall to really see what subtle hues each white contains. So buy a can of the white you are considering and paint it on a wall. Let the paint dry before evaluating it and look at it on a sunny day, a cloudy day, and under artificial light. Chances are it will appear somewhat different in each condition.

    Most paint manufacturers group their paints in a way that will give you clues as to which “white” will go with which wall color. Let’s suppose you selected a Sherwin Williams color for the siding of your new house and it was “SW 6003, Proper Gray.” Then you were looking for the right white for the trim. How would you know which of the twenty-some whites they offer would go best with your siding color? In this case, you should select “SW 6000, Snowfall.” That’s because it is in the same color family as the siding color you already selected. In fact, all of the colors from SW 6000 through SW 6006, Black Bean, are in the same family. They all contain the same colors, but in varying intensities. So you can be certain they will go together. Another white, like SW 6049 Gorgeous White, might look just fine in a small sample. But when the trim was painted, it’s underlying brownish hue would show through and it would clash with the cooler gray of your SW 6003 siding.

    Dark colors can be just as tricky. Suppose you wanted a dark Green or a dark Burgundy for your shutters. You might be inclined to pick a color that looks nice and dark in the small chip. But I’ll warn you that when your shutters are painted and you stand back from them, your dark green will mysteriously morph into Kelly Green and your very ark Burgundy will look a lot more like a Red Zinfandel. Dark colors will look lighter in larger areas and when placed on darker backgrounds. So to get the truly dark Green or Burgundy, select one that looks nearly black in the paint chip. Then, paint out a larger area just to be sure.

    For the cost of a few cans of paint, you can avoid the costly mistake of having to repaint your entire house after the color gremlins change what you thought picked into something you never intended.

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    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.

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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.

    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.

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Dream House Fumble #3

    Does the brick look “glued on” to you? It does to me. Brick is a heavy, solid material that is the actual structure of thousands and thousands of buildings that date back to the Romans. It is a material that should express its strength and it should not be used as a “detail” material or a wall facing, like vinyl siding.

    In this house, the item that really caught my eye and drove me to snap this picture and show it to you is the “key”, or “keystone” at the top of the half-round. A key is the wedge shaped block at the 12:00 o’clock position. Originally, in masonry arches, the key was the last stone set. It secured the arch structurally, making it capable of supporting considerable loads across an open span. In classic detailing, the key in an arch often was mimicked when the arch was built of wood. It retained it’s psychological quality of “locking” the structure together.

    In our example here, the arch is made of brick, the key is made of wood, and there is no key at all in the brickwork! The brick absolutely denies its structural properties. If it were structural, it would collapse. As a result, the brick appears as simply an applied material that serves as mere siding. The entire look is visually abrasive and dissonant. This window would have been much more successful if the wooden key had been omitted and a brick or cast stone key had been installed in the brickwork.

    While we’re at it, I could point out other strange details, like the excessive width of the window trim and the awful half-round fan detail above the center window. I suppose that was put there to replace a more expensive true fan window. A real window would have made a great difference for only a couple of hundred dollars. Wouldn’t it be worth it right on the front of the house? I will give them credit for placing the downspouts around the corner and not running them right on top of the brick quoins. Ironically, the quoins are costly and enhance the expression of strength in the masonry. Better to have ditched the quoins and done the window and arch properly.

   You may think this is a little picky. But this is what separates a good house from a marginal house. The details make the difference.

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     My question to you, dear reader, is do you see what’s wrong with this brickwork?

     I’ll tell you what struck my eye in tomorrow’s post.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com