The 9 Essential Ingredients to a Complete Home Design
It’s common for people to start with the dream house in mind and then work backwards. Which can leave your mind spinning off in too many directions. This can lead to financially and emotionally costly decisions which can certainly be avoided. A few simple questions in the following areas will set you on a path of least distraction. Get your self focused!
1. What’s the purpose of the home?
Is it for investment or is it to live in?
Who will be living there ?
How long will you live or own this house?
2. What’s the budget?
It’s all well and good having an amazing house but does it really suit you financially? Are you really going to be comfortable with the Loan Repayments when interest rates rise? Can you honestly make the type of build you want, happen for the budget that you actually have got?
3. Choose the right Building Design Consultant?
Experience matters. Choose the wrong consultant and you will be constantly feeling like its all wrong. They don’t listen, they don’t have the experience, they don’t have the patience. This isn’t a good journey. A good consultant will know what questions to ask and have the background experience in home design to listen and translate your ideas and wishes into a practical outcome.
With 20 years of Construction experience, and more than 10 years designing & selling new homes you can be assured that when working with me you are in safe hands.
4. Location & Compliance
Have you considered the building codes and guidelines for the area you are planning to build. Is there specific guidelines the developer is requesting from how you building looks to how it performs? What other compliance issues do you need to know?
Having a Building Design Consultant that knows what and who to ask and what research to do is really crucial. At the end of the day missing a few items can cost you many $1,0000s or even kill a project
5. Energy Efficiency & Solar Passive Design
This area is often overlooked but can be some of the most crucial decisions to make. A home that is to cold and to hot or to dark is expensive to run with the heating, cooling and lighting bills at maximum. A year round energy efficient home lower energy costs saving $1,000s over time.
6. Design Layout – Maximising Size, Light and Space
Tailoring a design layout to suit your lifestyle or purpose for the home has to work in tandem with the building envelope. An experienced designer can interpret exactly how you wish to live into a functional design. This is complicated matrix of room size, door/window openings, passages etc. Being intelligent with design means you can extract maximum apparent volume from width and height of spaces where they matter most to maximise space giving the appearance of a bigger home.
7. Kitchen and Bathroom Design
Kitchen & Bathrooms are utility areas that have to serve the user and provide an eye appeal in design to make them an attractive feature that will Hero the home. These are typically smaller higher traffic areas that need maximum attention ease of use and visual aesthetic. Having an experience design consultant to guide you and listen to your experience will add value living and resale of your home.8. Function, Storage and Furnish-ability
These are the final steps in understanding just how well a design will work for the inhabitants of the home. Being able to customise the little things like the enough storage, allowing for furniture, space for interaction, space for privacy. Little things like not hearing a toilet flush in your living areas. All these things done right will leave you living in a constantly pleasing home.
8. Style Interior / Exterior Design
Bring the Wow factor. Its not overly costly to have a home that is like a display home. Get the Interior right and it will add thousands to the resale value of your home. Get it wrong and you will be disappointed and it will leave people feeling underwhelmed in the space and limit appeal when selling your home. There are some very quick and clever ways to get a designer finished home without the hours and head aches.
9. Future Proof
We are all living in the now. But it is smart to consider what your life could look like in 5-10 years time. Have you considered your home for the future? The things to look for are if you plan on staying in the home that you get the design right your lifestyle now but also consider how this may change. Additionally if you create a home that can suit multiple outcomes from a couples domain to a family home you will also have broader appeal for resale down the track.