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.

Consider reinventing your house. Remodeling includes all sorts of home improvement projects. Projects that change the characteristics of your house and make it suit your new life situation are more than a simple sprucing up and remodeling. I call this “reinventing” your house. Why not consider reinventing your family house into your retirement house?

Our families and our lives evolve. When you are raising your children, an upstairs master bedroom makes sense. You want to be near the kids in case they need you during the night. But when they leave home and you are getting older, those stairs don’t look as easy to climb several times a day. And you know that as more years go by, there is some chance that you may not be able to climb them at all. Many homes can be reinvented from a family house to a retirement house with the addition of a first floor master bedroom suite. It might take some clever planning and confirmation that there is enough room on your property to do it. An architect can help you with that.  But reinventing means you won’t have to spend all that money on commissions and moving costs. Instead, that money can go directly toward the cozy first floor master bedroom suite with the fancy new bathroom you’ve dreamed of.

Staying where you are and reinventing your house has many other benefits. If you like where you currently live, if you have great neighbors, familiar stores, doctors, and restaurants nearby, if your church is around the corner, and you live close to many of the things you like, why start over? Change your house into your retirement house and let those upstairs bedrooms simply become guest rooms for the children and grandchildren.

Remodeling  and reinventing can cause some turmoil. But selling a house, buying a new one, and moving can be an even bigger hassle. And with the construction industry being slow, construction costs are down.

Spend some time thinking of what your present house could be. Ask an architect for some ideas. He or she might see things you don’t. You might surprise yourself with the possibilities.

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

I know that in our house, with four adult children and their family and friends visiting, we often have a packed house. We wanted a house that was not too big, but would be able to adapt to different needs. We wanted a house that was flexible.

Consider holiday dinners. How will you fit all of those people at one table? Or will some folks have to sit in the kitchen? One way to keep everyone together is to be sure your dining space is expandable in one direction. In our house, we have a dining room that opens to the foyer area. Normally the dining room furniture sits appropriately within the dining room space that is defined by a tray ceiling and to widely spaced columns that denote the end of the dining room and the beginning of the foyer. The opening between the columns is wide enough so that when we extend the table by setting an additional table at the end of the regular dining room table, our temporary banquet table simply stretches into the foyer space. As a result, we can seat twenty people at one sitting.

Other things to consider in making your house flexible are where additional living room type seating might occur, where everyone might sleep, and how multiple people might work in your kitchen at the same time. If you can do these things while maintaining the intimate, comfortable aspect of the house when just you and your fellow full-time residents are there, you’ll have a flexible house that is not overly large.

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

“Mr. Hirsch, I love your book, it puts into words all the things I couldn’t when viewing houses!” Cathy B.

Thanks, Cathy. You made my day.

House design is very intangible. Many times we can feel that things are not right in one house and comfortably perfect in another, but it is hard to explain why. However, there are principles architects employ to make a design cohesive, flowing, and appropriate. Architects deal with scale and composition. Good house design is about much more than putting one room next to another. It’s about balance, proportions and sequencing of spaces. It’s about optimizing space and making spaces fit their purpose. These are things architects study and understand.

In my book, Designing Your Perfect House, I explore these concepts and try to explain them in plain English. I’m delighted that Cathy felt I managed to do that. You can download a few chapters, for free, on my website. Just click here.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

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

I refer to siding, brick, stone, stucco, and other sidings as the “weatherproofing” of the house. These materials keep the bulk of the wind and water out, but even perfectly installed siding material will still let in small, but significant, amounts of moisture. There is no effective way to stop this and it does not indicate the house is poorly built.

Do you remember the old black tar paper that used to be installed around a house before the siding was installed? That layer is the actual barrier against water infiltration. It is the true waterproofing of a house. These days, tar paper has been replaced with several high-tech House Wraps, like Tyvek and Typar by DuPont, Weathermate by Dow, and PinkWrap by Owens Corning.

Materials such as these have revolutionized house waterproofing. Much more resistant to moisture infiltration than old fashioned tar paper, these materials substantially improve the energy performance of the house, as well. By reducing the air infiltration in exterior frame walls, particularly on windy days, these high-tech house wraps help the building insulation remain effective. All insulation works on the principle of dead air being the actual insulator. The insulation simply keeps the air still so it can insulate. You can imagine that if air is moving around in the wall cavity, the “R” value (insulating value) is going to be lost. The house wraps keep wind from penetrating the walls and compromising the insulation’s effectiveness. House wraps will save you a lot of money in heating and cooling costs.

When the windows and doors of a house are installed, the house wrap is taped to the window and door frames with special tape to insure a tight seal. When this is done and the roof has been installed on the house, the house is watertight, regardless of whether any of the siding has been installed. The siding material is there to protect the house wrap, deflect the heavy weather, and for looks.

If your house is being built in a cold climate and you are worried about brick, stone, or stucco being installed in freezing conditions, you don’t have to delay the start of construction. You can begin the house, provided weather permits the foundation to be built, and let the builder frame everything. He can install the roofing, install the windows, and wrap the house up with one of the house wraps. The house will be watertight and the interior construction can continue. The masonry on the exterior can wait until warmer weather without delaying the rest of the construction.

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

It can cost a lot of money to sell a house and move. Realtor fees and moving expenses can cost as much as a total kitchen makeover. So why not save the real estate commissions and moving expenses which, once spent, are gone and can never be recovered. Instead, put the money into something you can use and enjoy, something tangible like a great new kitchen or a luxurious master bathroom.

Many people were saving money in their retirement accounts to use to build or buy their home retirement. Their current homes were good for raising children, but now that the children are gone, the upstairs master bedroom and other accessibility considerations make the house inappropriate for aging occupants. But retirement accounts have taken big hits. That loss of their assets combined with the decline in value of their current house has many people finding themselves unable to afford the retirement house they dreamed of. So instead of retiring to the house of their dreams, more and more people are remodeling their current houses to be the kind of house that works for them.

This can be done by adding a ground floor master bedroom suite to permit single level living, altering and enhancing master baths to allow handicapped access and added convenience, making alterations to remove other steps within the house or at the doors, and updating the house to include the conveniences and amenities people now want and need. Formal dining rooms can be converted into home offices or libraries and studies. Screened porches, patios, and outdoor kitchens can be added to change a home from a growing family type of house to a leisure living home. Even face-lift makeovers to change the appearance of the house and re-landscaping to reduce yard maintenance can be done.

There are other intangible benefits to remodeling beyond the financial and lifestyle benefits. Staying in the neighborhood where your doctors, banks, favorite stores, churches, clubs, and friends are can make staying put a lot more gratifying than pulling up stakes and relocating. If you don’t think your present house is good for your golden years, think again. You might have the nucleus of a wonderful leisure living house right beneath your feet.

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

One aspect of the entrance to a house that you may overlook or under-appreciate is the concept of transition from public to private. This is a concept I discuss in some detail in Designing Your Perfect House. The minds of human beings seek order. Our minds don’t like abrupt changes. We are most comfortable with gradual transitions. If you consider the sensation when you step from your dark bedroom in the middle of the night and turn on the light in the bathroom, you get a pretty good idea of how harsh a change can feel. Our psyche reacts to changes in spaces, albeit subconsciously, the same way. Sudden shifts from one type of space to another can be jarring and disconcerting.

When approaching and entering a house, the entry experience is a transition from the public domain of the street to the private domain of your home. Unfortunately, many houses are built where this transition occurs in one or two steps. Think of houses where you simply walk up to the front door and step through right into the living room. I guarantee this feels uncomfortable to you even if you can’t explain it except to say that it seems to compromise the privacy of the living room. Actually what is happening is there was no “middle place” to let your mind adjust from public to private.

Front steps, porches, vestibules, and defined foyers are all part of a better entry transition from public to private. A front step and porch are still open to the public, but they have some private aspect to them since they belong to the house and the porch might even be covered, thus making it become a little bit of an indoor space. Your foyer is much more private because it is behind your front door, but it is not as private as your family room. It still carries some publicness because you greet guests there, visitors can see into it from the front door, and there is no sitting furniture indicating that people linger there.

I was in New Jersey recently and I noticed this lovely, unique entry experience.

This house faces a fairly busy street, but the columns and roof overhang “claim” a piece of the public space for the house. If you step onto the front porch, you feel that you have stepped out of the public realm and into a more private place. The front porch space is somewhat cozy since it wraps around the visitor, embracing them and making them feel welcomed. It lets you anticipate the next step into the foyer. And what really struck me is the creative and unusual way these spaces were created. This is hardly your standard front porch. It speaks of character and expresses something a typical front porch would miss.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.