Information Home Design: July 2010

Monday, July 12, 2010

What Makes A Good Home Design?

A home design from an architect's point of view is not just brick walls painted with expensive colors and finishes. There are many factors involved while designing any architectural building.

Architect's prefer two types of approaches while designing a home building. In the first type the architect focuses on the requirements of the client as far as number of spaces, style, budget is concerned. He may discuss various aspects with his client and come up with a unique home design that is the best possible solution for the needs of his client.

On the other hand some architects think the opposite way. They first visualize the complete form of the home building and then "fit" the necessary spaces inside this form in the best possible way. One of
the best examples of this type of designs is the "Guggenheim Museum" in New York designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

This museum designed has been derived from an inverted cone form pointing down at the ground. The rest of the museum spaces have been very creatively "fitted" in the cone shape without disturbing the
massing of the cone itself. This type of design practice requires a great deal of command on visualization and designing of circulation spaces within the building.

So which of the above two is the correct method? Both are correct methods, that is because the success of any building design is not dependent upon the methods of design but the comfort levels of the residents.

If a home building can not provide basic comforts to the residents like fresh air circulation, ample sunlight, clear circulation spaces, then it can be said to be a failure. Fulfilling these basic requirements of a home design is not at all dependent on expensive construction methods.

Even a low cost home building can be a great design that makes full use of all the natural resources to make the residents comfortable. That is why a good design does not mean "expensive design". In the
modern contemporary design styles simplicity is the key to better design and interiors. The design that can solve the basic functional problem as well as triggers the emotional impulse in the user is considered a good design.

Start Your Home Design Using These Home Design Tools

You've decided you want to build a new home. Where do you start? First, we suggest you purchase your land, as this will surely impact the design of your home. Second, start putting your ideas together before visiting your architect.

Start with a vision of your new home. Is there a certain architectural style you prefer? Colonial? Cape? Saltbox? Farmhouse? From there, start with the basics in home design. How many bedrooms will you need? Do you want a Master Bedroom with or without a Master Bathroom suite? Will it be located on the first or second floor? If this is a vacation home which will become your retirement home, you may prefer to have the main rooms located on the first floor for easy access in later years. Do you want a large, eat-in kitchen or a separate dining room?

Are you planning to entertain small or large groups of people in your home? Is a cathedral Great Room on your list of priorities? Will you need a living room or media room separate from your Great Room? Do you have a specific hobby or interest that requires a separate room or area?

Compare all of these areas with your current home. Does the space you have now fit your needs? Write down the measurements of your space and then mark whether or not the space is adequate. Wherever possible, look for areas to reduce the living space. For instance, if you have a large laundry room now and you only really use half of the space, mark it as a potential space saver. Anytime you reduce the square footage of your new home you will save money in initial material costs, but in energy costs over the life of the home as well.

A home fulfills many purposes, but it can also satisfy numerous personal, aesthetic, and emotional requirements that can be difficult to describe in words. In starting to imagine your home design, it will help your architect if you identify and communicate how you want each space to feel. How?

You may find it a challenge to explain how you want a room to feel. Start by doing some simple exercises. Pick up a home magazine or imagine a home you are familiar with. Find a room you like. What do you like about it? The way the afternoon sunlight casts shadows within the room? The room's intimacy or its abundant space?

Think about other spaces you enjoy - the park, the library, your friend's home. How does the space make you feel? What creates that feeling? Be specific, and write down what you like about it. For instance, you might write, "I like how the room's color tones change as the sun sets" or "I love how the outdoors is brought inside". These small realizations will help the home design to evolve from a floor plan to a custom home that is an extension of your life philosophy.

Do this for each room in your home design. It is also helpful to describe what you don't like about certain floor plans, rooms, or space. For instance, if you are not fond of having to walk through your closet to enter your Master Bedroom, document this. Perhaps you like the great room in a magazine photo but you don't like the television being the center of attention. Or, you may like the space but find it lacks the intimacy you're looking for in your home - a cozy corner where you can chat with another couple, a well-lit reading area, or a secluded spot for your cell phone chargers, mail and telephone. Keep all of your notes together. Cut out full pages or small photos that describe your likes and dislikes. As you go through this process, you can update your thoughts with text and photos. Eventually, you will come to a good understanding of what you want your custom home to look and feel like. Bring your notebook to your first meeting with your architect. Starting with your vision in hand will expedite the design process while guaranteeing success.

Build Your Dream Home With a Custom Home Designer

house planning practice includes many details that most people even noticed. Home use professional designers can help you handle problems that arise in designing and building your dream home whether in Sydney Australia or other parts of the world. Results can be used to design your home with a very well exceed your dreams.

The first thing a designer will want to find home use when discussing your dream home is where you intend to build. Finding land is the first step to creating a home practice. Of course, you need to get an idea of what you intend to build but can get land first major impact in determining what will be done on a lot of homework and plan for it together.

If you already have the land, then you prior to processing. If you are looking for land or a designer can recommend an agent who can help you find a lot. They also may have some great information that will suit your building needs.

Once the land has been acquired, there are some things to consider when designing a practice at home. Sidewalk land and the natural environment plays an important role in determining several factors involved in designing your home custom designed. These factors include and houses being built along the water, what direction the house faces, where the sun rises along with the house, and other geographical factors.

Sydney house designers usually will help you with the creative process of building your home. You may have good ideas, however, what you want in your in your home. This is a good idea to get some photos to share with the designer items that have inspired you and your plan for your home. After drawing a scrapbook with pictures of the different elements of the house can make the process easier to start with the designer.

The designer took the information you have provided land and geographical features and make your plans. This method Freehand drawing plan and consider how you can check your package ground. They may do this by using advanced software technology that provides 360-degree view of the plan.

A designer then developed a home exercise plan. This means taking the idea of a draft plan which is designed as a professional. Part of this process will take everything you have done to this time and incorporated into a practical plan. The pictures you provided, the plan and the land and every situation that might include land, all considered at this time and greatly affect the design of development.

Once you have the floor plan and preparation of internal and external schema in the house, you're ready to build. This blueprint for the scheme and provide a starting point for the construction phase and provide an understanding of where all the doors, windows and other elements of this house. This also will provide visualization of how the flow diagram, how to feed into the one room to another, and how all the area of domestic public and private interaction. At this point you are ready to consider building.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Custom Log Home Design Ideas

Custom log home design ideas can be used to help create the dream log home you've always wanted. Perhaps you have some custom log home design ideas on paper as you've been collecting design ideas. That's a great way to plan and organize your ideas, by making a scrapbook of the things you may want in your log home design. Here are some tips for custom designing your log home:

1. Explore and Select Your Log Home Style - select the log home style that you really want and like, a style that excites you. Will you prefer the manufactured or handcrafted log home style? Manufactured log homes are made with logs that are milled into a desired shape, producing uniform logs without taper. The logs used generally range in length from 10 to 18 feet. A custom log home design using manufactured logs can vary considerably in shape and appearance because the logs have different shapes and there are different corner styles. You can obtain kits ranging from just the logs and fasteners to more complete systems that include the roofing materials, doors, windows and even more.

A handcrafted custom log home design means handcrafters will strip the bark off of whole logs. Using special skills and tools, the handcrafter will fit each log into place. Handcrafted custom log home design and construction is labor intensive, and the construction process takes longer and usually costs more since so much work is done manually. This method attempts to preserve the natural shape of the tree, and each log is carefully trimmed and shaped for a specific location in the log shell. The logs may be assembled at the company's yard, the pieces are numbered, taken apart and shipped to the homesite to be reassembled.

2. Visualize Home Traffic Flow - a good way to create a custom log home design is to take floorplans you like and pretend you're coming home, entering and moving around in the home. Come in the front door -- where will you place your coat? What do you see in front of you as you enter? Which way to the kitchen and pantry if you are carrying groceries? Visualize sitting in the living room or family room. Will you be entertaining guests? Is having a fireplace high on your list of priorities? Try to note where the bathroom or bathrooms are located. As you finish your shower, where are the towels hanging?

Another helpful exercise when visualizing custom log home design is to examine the things that you like about where you live now. What things would you like to keep and what are things you'd like to change and have in your new home? For example, perhaps you'll want a much larger kitchen. Pay special attention to the kitchen work triangle -- the distance between the sink, refrigerator and range or cooktop. Each one of these areas becomes a focal point in the kitchen and forms the three points of a triangle with different distances between them. Done correctly, proper custom log home design in the kitchen gives you the most efficient food preparation area layout. Walk through each room of the floorplan and see how the room feels and functions and how its location seems in relation to other rooms.

3. Plan Your Home Orientation and Layout - when creating a custom log home design, pay attention to your site and how the orientation of individual rooms will be done. Locate the bedrooms towards the cooler, nighttime north. Place your kitchen facing the east to catch the early morning sun. The living room and recreational room can have a kind of transitional orientation, facing the warm noon south sun. And the dining area can be oriented towards the late afternoon western sun. Natural light, window placement, orientation and views are powerful positive factors in human health and the comfort of your new home.

A great way to learn custom log home design ideas is to view log home plans that have been successfully built already. Use the speed of the internet to view plans, plans that you enjoy. Every plan that you review can give you custom log home design ideas that you had not thought of. Instead of trying to create brand new plans from scratch, you can save considerable time and money if you can find great plans that have already been built successfully somewhere. This means the plans will work. Just be sure the plans service can make the changes to the plans so they become exactly what you want. That way, you really can create the custom log home design that will provide you many years of enjoyment.

What is a Home Designer and How to Choose One

A home designer specifies design, materials, stylishness, as well as details for residential building projects. In lots of states in the US home designers aren't mandated to have an architectural diploma or architectural license. Many people may evaluate these kinds of home designers not having these qualifications to be an undesirable factor. Basically that is definitely not even close to the truth. A professional within the field of non commercial design a "home designer" is the most suitable choice that will lead you through the design and building undertaking.

A great home designer generally possesses years of expertise not only designing and drafting the construction docs in addition will often have put in many years on actual construction sites performing the actual job themselves. Now this isn't at all times the situation however, these people with this kind of knowledge are usually best to design your home. Not just because of their experience and expertise in the profession but their rates tend to be more affordable when compared to a registered architect's charges will be.

The rates a home designer, as well as an architect command has proven to be completely different. Architects attain four years or more of college getting an education and studying the particulars on architect home design as well as architectural design of almost everything else all varying from little homes to large high-rise buildings. Architects are registered to approve numerous facets of building not employed for individual houses. Because of these two details architects demand very high service fees to create an architectural design in addition to a set of construction drawings for houses. The majority of architect's charges vary from 7% to 15% (sometimes greater) for his or her services on a housing project. Almost all home designers' rates for this exact same service vary from 3% to 8%. This particular large variation in rates combined with the undeniable fact that each commonly possess the identical or the same level of expertise in residential design is actually the reason why the majority will probably select a home designer above an architect for their housing project.

Even though design capacity can virtually, be trained, the most effective jobs are the effect of a mix of skill and knowledge, therefore your choice in who to employ shouldn't be exclusively selected simply for their reduced rates or education. A home designer needs to be selected as due to their outstanding results of their labor.

Home designers make use of numerous sources and instruments accessible to them to assist in communicating their architectural designs as well as the construction documents into the completed product. Many home designers continue to utilize pencil and paper in addition to numerous types of color goods to symbolize and express their design to their clientele. Even though this can be a great method of communicating a design to a customer it really is outdated and doesn't consistently accomplish the job the home designer developed it for, to help the customer to fully grasp and picture the design. Nowadays there's a large amount of computer programs that enable a great house designer to provide their house design to their clientele. These types of graphic tools as I prefer to refer to them include things like 3D colored renderings, walk-a-rounds, as well as walk-throughs.

Therefore, when you're looking to select a designer it's also advisable to consider exactly how they show their designs to their clientele. Not everybody can easily figure out a conceptual drawing of a 2D floor plan. In fact ultimately it will come right down to what home designer you sense you might have more suitable connection with and you feel the most confident with.

Building a residence signifies one of the biggest monetary assets the majority of people is likely to make within their lifetime and very few comprehend just how complicated the procedure will be till they're involved with a lot of restricted covenants, construction requirements, zoning ordinances, design and style choices, material options, suppliers as well as builder options and so forth. Do your family as well as your bank account a favor and locate a home designer to partner with and to who you're confident with.