How to design your dream home? (Part 9)

By Phil / On Sep.07.2015 / In / Width 0 Comments

I’m continuing this blog post series a week late, due to matters aside, but here it is anyway. The past week I cycled back to the first in my list of typologies, traditional or period style. Once you have decided on the basic massing and have a plan you’re happy with, most of the big decisions are behind you, but there are still a lot of fiddly details that need to be sorted, and you just need to wade through them one by one.

 We left the design in blog post 4, I was happy with the shell design and plan so proceeded to fill in the details, first up, the windows. American tradition style homes seemed to favour sash windows judging by images on the web, so that was an easy choice, glazing appears typically subdivided into squares, so I add added this feature too. I moved on to look at the eaves details, in the US these appear to be a little fancier that is typical here in the UK, not sure why that would be, but again I copied the American style precedent, with profiled gutter and soffit board. It seems kind of odd to me to have gutter returns on the front of the gables, very chocolate boxy, but hey, some people like it that way. Some of the windows popped about the eaves line, I looked at various options to resolve this, and settled on wrapping the eaves profile around the top of the window, which I had also seen on various examples on the web. The garage doors I revised to three separate 2.5m wide double swing barn doors, I kept the doors size down thinking they might otherwise be hard to manage in a high wind. I looked at a few brick color options, settling on the mauve, and to add variety and contrast, changed one of the gables on the front to stone, and changed the central part of the rear elevation to white render.

 I didn’t spend too long on the site layout, just straightened things out a bit, adding a rectangular swimming pool, to create a more formal arrangement, perhaps a little more could be done with the front drive, but I may return to that later. To add the photoreal touches to the images, I brought in the entourage I used with the other house plans. The results are below, let me know what you think in the comments.