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Last Updated: Oct 29th, 2004 - 03:55:13 |
The following article is the thoughts of the author. It does not necessarily represent the ideas of SPLASH, it's members, users, or administrators. Please direct your comments to the author at Rltarch@mindspring.com, or open a discussion on the Message Board.
I can still hear the crunch of the gravel driveway under the tires of Grandpa's Dodge Fury at my grandparents' home in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. I remember how well the house seemed to fit them and my great-grandmother, who lived with them, and how everything had its place in their home. In that simpler time homes were smaller and less complex, as were the lives of the people those houses sheltered. My grandparents and their home seemed a perfect match. They were very comfortable in 1,200 square feet. I was a kid when they lived in that house, so it didn't occur to me until many years later to wonder whether that home had been built to fit their lifestyle, or whether they had adapted their lifestyle to fit the house. My guess is that in 1933 somebody had a good knowledge of how people went about their daily lives and designed that house to fit those lifestyles.
At its very best, your home designs should reflect and support who your clients are; at the very least it should support how they live in it. Although highly personalized design is found mostly in the custom home market, even a modest home should have a floor plan that is in sync with contemporary lifestyles. The vast majority of new homes in this country are built on speculation, so we don't always have the chance to explore an individual client's lifestyle and design a home that fits it. But it is important for our home designs to keep pace with the lives we live in them, and we can find opportunities every day to learn more about what these lifestyles are. One place to learn is through the discussions with our custom home clients. Many Architects, designers, and builders have an unfortunate tendency to draw more or less whatever their clients ask them to, without engaging them in a thorough discussion about how they really live. That discussion, and the designs that evolve from it, can help inform our speculative design work.
Many family home designs have gotten far too large and expensive. We add more space and more features (and more money), but are we gaining a proportionate amount of livability? The 2,500 square-foot four-bedroom homes that we designed ten years ago have grown to 3,500 square feet. It seems that a family just can't live in a house anymore if each child doesn't have his own bathroom, or at least private access to a shared bath. I grew up in a house with a ping-pong table in the basement; the "same" house today has a 1,500 square-foot finished lower level with bathroom, exercise room and wet bar. Dad used to proof-read his work in the family room while the kids watched TV or played board games; now Dad needs an entire separate study for the same function. Many of our clients want separate walk-in closets for each head of the household, and they often ask for master bathrooms that are, well, just big.
Many of these upscale features eventually become hot buttons for spec homes, too. But providing all of these features and size is too easy to do and can mask the real challenge, designing a home that provides a quality living experience. Generally, with a given construction budget, more quality can be designed in if the size of the house if kept smaller. If we pay more attention to how families live, we can create better designs that trade off raw square footage for better livability.
There is a sociological danger present when a house gets too big, and it stems in part from compartmentalization. The more we separate the occupants of a home with larger spaces that are increasingly specific to a particular use, the less interaction we allow between the members of the household. Our homes should encourage, invent, and enable family interaction. When the design of a house becomes a barrier to family interaction, we invite all manner of problems. Good residential design brings people together in pleasant ways. Learn more about this by taking the time to ask your custom home clients about every detail of their daily lives. What is the first thing they do when they get up in the morning-head straight for the shower or down to the coffee maker? Do the kids eat breakfast at the table or do they grab a pop-tart on the way out of the door? Perhaps a built-in desk in a corner of the family room will suffice for Dad's evening work, and we can take the money that they would have spend on a study and create 9-foot ceilings instead. Find out what's really driving the desire for that big master bath-maybe you can make it smaller and better. If you're not spending at least four hours talking with your clients about their daily lives before a single line is drawn, you are not asking enough questions. To commit any less time to an examination of the design problem (your clients) is to rob your clients of the potential benefits of a custom home design, and it keeps you ignorant of the finer points of good speculative design.
My grandparents moved south many years ago, leaving their "perfect" old house behind for the next family. I wonder if it fits the new owners as well as it did the my grandparents, or if they've had to make changes to accommodate their unique lifestyle? I hope they haven't paved the driveway.
© Copyright 2004 by SPLASH
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