One Simple Truth When
Designing Your Home
Designing a new home can be a stressful experience for any
new home owner. After all, it will be part of your life, every day, for a long
time.
There are plenty of plan services that work and get designs
into the hands of clients. However, there is no one size fits all solution that
works for everyone. A home is the expression of the home owner. An
off-the-shelf plan offers a solution to dodge the stress of designing a home,
this option is only an instant gratification. When it comes down to it, sure,
it made the process easier, but it didn’t create something that was truly your
own.
Be Honest
There is one simple truth when designing a home. You have to
be honest with yourself. At the heart of every design, every client has to
reconcile where they think they are with where they are actually at. Honesty in
design is very difficult because most people don’t want to see themselves
as they are. It is my job to help that process along. Let’s be honest, are you
messy or neat? Are you really a night person? Or a morning person, who’s a victim of the night?
The key is to help you discover the real you, the real
family. Nearly every house has a kitchen, family room, dining room and bathroom. I rearrange, shift, enlarge or shrink each component to fit each family’s
needs and desires. Everything can be thought through, changed, detailed, and
finessed until it is as perfect as it can be. Homes are not perfect. That
is not the goal, personality is. Personality is character.
The starting point is asking a lot of questions and talking
about your lifestyle. Designing homes for each family requires a one on one
approach. It requires direct communication and instant feedback. Otherwise,
there is no way to tell where the project is going. The integrity of each
design is a starting point to begin the next chapter of each client's story.
This process doesn’t mean the project will become an
outrageous castle out of Game of Thrones. We are simply looking for the small
things that will give each home personality and integrate them into the larger
picture. These small things will elevate what could have been just a house into
a grand home.
If you enjoy this post, please share some of your thoughts and past experiences on the process home design in the comments below.
