What to get right

Building a new home or remodeling your current one is a process filled with excitement, questions, decisions, joy, and even a little heartache. You can certainly find many books or websites that will instruct you in how to go about this process, telling you what you should build or how you should live. What I propose here is not to teach you how to go about this process but to point out some aspects that are exceedingly critical and which deserve careful attention and consideration. These are the things that create the feel and quality of your homes, decisions that have far reaching consequences, details that cannot be easily changed later.

Siting

How a house sits on and interacts with the land, whether a city lot or acres of countryside, impacts almost every aspect of its character. It affects what you see as you approach your home, how you enter the front door, how sunlight plays in the rooms throughout the day, how you move through the house, what you see through the windows, or even what neighbors might see through the windows. For most architects, planning where and how a house sits on its site is the starting place for design. The house might perch on a cliffside or sit low, hugging the terrain. It might sit proudly for all to see or hide away under the deep cover of a copse of trees. This vision is the beginning, the starting point for creating the character of your home.

Composition 

That character  is then further refined by the composition of a homes parts and pieces. A house might have a compact form creating a sense of solidity and protection or it might be spread out into a community of small structures. It might have a series of shapes and forms that feel as if they accreted over time rather than having been planned and built all at once. Regardless of the form, order and beauty come with the balance and alignment of parts, the arrangement of window and doors, the perfection of proportion and scale.

Organization

The organization of a house – the disposition of its rooms – works in conjunction with the composition of the whole. Here the site is still an influence as you should give careful consideration to the locations of rooms and hallways to best take advantage of the opportunities and to minimize any detriments a site may offer. Place the most lived in spaces towards the exterior walls and light while tucking the more utilitarian spaces away will help make a house that is filled with sunlight. Align passageways to blend with the site and beckon the house’s occupants outside to the landscape beyond. The end result of this should be a house that blends comfortably with the site and exudes the desired character.

Movement

In the most basic sense a house is nothing more that a series of rooms that we use for common functions. A kitchen for cooking, a bedroom for sleeping, a dining room for eating. But how these spaces are arranged and how they are connected has a huge impact on how a house feels and functions. We often begin by talking about the relationship of one space to another; is the dining room convenient to the kitchen? Are the kid’s bedrooms too close or too far from the master bedroom? How far do you have to walk at night to get to the bathroom? Just as important when considering the layout of a home, is how you move through its spaces. Is that movement intelligible? Is it beautiful? What happens at the end of a hallway? What happens as you walk the length of that hallway? How do you enter a room? What is seen; what is hidden? The functional relationship of the rooms is critical, but so too is how those spaces are connected.

Views

While siting the house has to do with the position of the house in the context of the surrounding landscape, and the organization of its rooms tends to be more functional, both of these aspects of a home’s design can influence the opportunities to create views within your home. Views through a window can frame features of the site or beckon you beyond the walls to the outside.  A window or door set at the end of a hallway, and the light they let in, will guide you along the length of the hall. If your home has rooms that open one to another, a window in a far wall can serve multiple rooms at once and make the space feel larger than it is. Also consider the views inside the house. What do you see as you glimpse into a room as you pass by? Is it interesting; is it beautiful? Perhaps that glimpse is of an inviting arrangement of furniture or a magnificent fireplace surround. Perhaps it is a view of a window set in the opposite wall. These are aspects that make a house enchanting.

Window and Doors

Windows and doors are two of the elements we interact with most in our homes. They are the parts that we touch most often and are the parts which provide the most character to a room. Windows and doors are also some of the most difficult parts of a house to change in the future. If you hope to create a quality home, this is a place to spend as much as you can afford rather than a place to skimp. Close your eyes and imagine opening a fine window. The latches feel silky and smooth in your hand and snap cleanly open. You feel the warmth and strength of the wood as you gently open the window and allow the outside into the room. Everything works smoothly and you can feel the solidity of the parts that shelter you from the weather. Similarly a well made door will swing smoothly on its hinges. When closed its solidity will make a pleasing thump as it divides room from room, inside from outside. These are things you want, the clean lines and details, solid long lasting hardware, the depth and beauty of the parts and design. Get it right and the windows and doors you install now will be the ones still with the house one hundred years from now.

Keeping these elements in mind while working through the process of design will help ensure that the home you build will be one that will last. A home that invites and enchants; that cradles you with comfort and delight.