Figuring Out What We Wanted

20 Nov 2019 - Tansy Arron-Walker

We knew when we bought this property we’d have to build a home, and we began thinking about what it might look like a year or more before we bought the land.

Initally we knew we wanted:

I think I looked at about every house plan on the internet. Many of them had interesting layouts, or ways to put things together I might not have thought of, but none of them were quite right.

I picked up a number of excellent books on the subject of house design and these further refined what we wanted in a home.

The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling by Daniel Chiras convinced me I wanted a house with a long east-west axis, allowing sunlight to stream into every room in winter, while being able to keep the interior shaded in summer. I drew a number of bubble diagrams showing which rooms should get morning and afternoon sun, and which rooms should be south facing (living spaces) and which to the north (office, bedrooms, utility spaces).

The Super House had a really excellent section on deciding which spaces we wanted and which we didn’t need, or could be combined. Turns out we wanted a dressing space, but didn’t see the point of his and hers master toilet rooms. We want a single place to sit and eat together, but not a formal dining room. We definitely don’t want an island bar, a dining room AND a breakfast nook (as many internet plans have). We definitely do need an office, and we really want a music studio. It also has a huge amount of information on building materials, heating and cooling, and more. (I haven’t finished it yet!) It introduced me to the concept of the super insulated house, and we’re definitely heading that direction.

Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect by William Hirsch reminded us that beauty as well as functionality is important. We want this house to remain loved and lived in for the next few hundred years, and that means taking care to make it fit in its environment, making sure it is pleasant and comfortable to live in, and that it is beautiful.

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander was a fascinating read. I’ve read this three times at least. It helps you imagine vividly spaces you want in and around your home, and makes it easy to explain how you want the spaces to feel. For me, this inspired our front entry way (a place to mess with your keys without being rained on, where you can start to feel as though you’ve arrived.), it reinforced my desire to have windows on at least two sides of every room, it cemented my desire for comfortable window seats. Possibly the most important concept was the privacy gradient. I drew a number of bubble diagrams describing the flow from more public spaces (entry, living, kitchen) to more private spaces (office, bedrooms, closets)

Every time we visit a new house or apartment we spend a half hour on the way home talking about what works and what doesn’t, which features we liked and which would drive us mad. We are thankfully pretty much on the same page with most things.

We read the ADA guidlines on accessible residences and have designed with aging in place in mind - wide halls and doorways, large enough bathrooms, a place to install an elevator if it becomes necessary in future.

So, after about a year of research and doodling and pinning thousands of images (and ruthlessly culling them, and then pinning a thousand more) we actually closed on the property. We took a few months then to finalize the layout of the farm and nail down the location of the house on the property, and then we hired an architect.