When having my first design meeting with new clients looking to build a new home , two things I try to have them forget about, at least initially, are style and re-sale.
The styles many have come to know and love didn't invent themselves. Each was a response to various input that often had little or nothing to do with referencing earlier styles. Each was a break in conventional thinking at the time to address the current issues of their time and place. To immediately jump into a certain, pre-established "style" is to immediately ground yourself before you've even tried to fly.
Though Frank Lloyd wright is commonly cited, both by professionals and layman alike, as the
single greatest American architect, it seems so many forget some of his most ardent advice about the design of homes, and buildings of any kind, when he wrote-
"Styles" once accomplished soon become yard - sticks for the blind, crutches for the lame, the recourse of the impotent, As humanity develops there will be less recourse to the "styles" and more style,- for the development of humanity is a matter of greater creative power for the individual- more of that quality in each that was once painfully achieved by the whole.
To condense what is a fairly profound and rarely found concept in homes, or other buildings,- Be yourself, in your place and in your time. Your home should be an expression of this on every level.
Start with your site, and don't start your design without a site. Find out how the sun tracks, where the wind comes from, what the seasons will bring and start your space planning there. Where do you want to be when the sun comes up in the morning? Where do you want to be when it is high in the sky, when it sets? And don't assume that just because your lot is tightly packed in with other houses that you don't have options to respond to these conditions.
In a purely intuitive, simple way, cut out some circles of paper that represent the relative size of each of the rooms you think you are going to need and/or want. Accuracy at this point isn't that important. Get a site plan of your property and play with the arrangement of these spaces on your site. Access to and from the site might be another obvious influence to your choices. Try to concentrate on just the relationships of the spaces without necessarily envisioning the shape of any structure. Circles help in this regard, whereas squares or rectangles tend to automatically get you thinking in terms of walls.
Pay attention to how the various spaces may want to be open to each other, or separate and private. Keep playing around with these and try and find the best balance of all of your objectives. The spaces might also have vertical relationships to each other. Maybe even a set of 3D spheres placed in Google Sketchup might help you start thinking more in 3 dimensions instead of two.
From there, you can use some simple rules of thumb championed by such influential architects as Christopher Alexander such as always having windows (however small) on at least two sides of every room.
And as far as re-sale goes, I am always amazed how much importance has been placed on this issue, mostly by real-estate agents. To make the tremendous effort and invest the amount of money and time necessary to successfully complete such a project while gearing the design toward some imagined future buyer has never ceased to baffle me. After over 20 years of designing and building projects for clients, I have come to believe very strongly that the spaces that you spend so much time in, especially your home, effect your every day life, your level of contentedness or happiness, in profound ways that may not always be initially apparent. The highest compliment every paid to me by a client was, "I just live differently now..."
This doesn't happen by fretting over style or re-sale. It happens by responding to some of these very fundamental, human needs and will serve you well when, if ever, you want to sell the house anyway. If you feel it and see it, so will others.
Bryce Engstrom is an Architect & General Contractor with over 20 years of experience in the design and build professions. Free information on all of the main aspects of the design, permit, and build processes is available online here: http://www.central-coast-project-design-planning-guides.com/
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