Building a custom home requires you to make your most daring dreams appear in the mind of your design professional. For those who aren’t used to expressing creative ideas, the process requires a little guidance, but it’s easier than you might think.
The Meaning Behind Your Dreaming
Architects use a term called “parti” to encapsulate the departure point, or guiding idea, behind your home. This can be purely aesthetic, but it can also be the story you want your home to tell. It can refer to the mood lighting achieves or the memory behind your favorite work of art.
Every home tells a story. The design features you choose needn’t be entirely devoid of meaning. Your house will be the setting for years of memories. Your design should thus be personal enough to honor them. Custom home designers are well versed in creating aesthetics based on feelings, so if you can communicate the emotional value of what you’re trying to achieve, you’re halfway there.
Ambition
Custom home building can be safe or ambitious, so don’t be afraid of expressing your wildest goals. An excellent design professional will try to find solutions that fall outside the norm. The details matter, too, so mention the gorgeous railing you saw at a décor fair last week or the light fitting you spotted at a friend’s home yesterday.
Partnership
The challenge of custom home building lies in knowing when to defer to your design professional. They’re trained to find the best way to make your dreams happen, and they will often know better than their clients how to bring those ideas to life. If your home builder tells you your copper faucets won’t suit that oak floor treatment you love so much, pay attention. Challenging your choices makes their job harder, not easier. They’re only doing it because they care about creating a home you’ll fall in love with.
Don’t Overdo It
A certain degree of minimalism allows your best features to shine, so while it’s tempting to overdo design elements, that will hide your primary focal points. Simplicity is often less expensive than complexity, and you can trust that every element of your plan will be crafted according to guiding design principles.
Custom home building requires you and your designer to create order in the chaos, a process that’s easy to achieve if you can visualise the ultimate result. It’s that vision that can be difficult to see, but architects are generally highly skilled in that sense, so trust them.
Custom home building is a process, not a destination. Some aspects of the building may emerge in time. If you’re renovating rather than building from scratch, this is somewhat easier to achieve. Your existing structure will guide the way.
Working with Repetition
Repeating design features and textures unifies the whole. These themes prevent clutter, so your home designer is likely to establish thematic repetition, breaking the rule occasionally to make a loud statement. Figuring out where the rules break and where they don’t requires communication, so try to clarify those points of interest you want to emphasise.
Design has an impact on all the senses and even beyond them. Many of the choices you make will involve creating silence or inviting in outdoor scents. Think beyond your sight, and work with a builder you trust. Alair Homes is here to help. Ultimately, you’ll arrive at a design that engages you on every level.