On the Board at Caldwell-Cline

We recently had the experience of working with Hardman Knox and West Point Lake Development, LLC on the guidelines for their new community Retreat on West Point Lake. Set in LaGrange Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta, Retreat is a 479 acre community set on beautiful West Pointe Lake. The community offers large home sites that include a covered boat slip at the community dock with a trail system to allow easy walking or bike access to to each dock.

This was and exciting project for us for several reasons. Together with Hardman we were able to create guidelines for Retreat at West Point Lake that allows for homes to be varied and unique while drawing inspiration from the natural setting. Homes should be informal and relaxed allowing for the environment and its surroundings to take the stage and the home to be a place for friends and family to come and enjoy the beauty of the lake and all the community has to offer.

As Retreat on West Pointe Lake sells home sites we will continue to work with them providing Architectural Review. Several lots have sold recently and homes will begin soon. We are excited to see the community start to take shape. For more information about this great community please visit their website here or become a fan of them on facebook here.

This is the first article of our our Great Home Series. Today Roger is going to discuss floor plans in regards to programming -

As with the beginning of any journey it is necessary to have a good direction and a plan of action. When I was a kid my father would always have the map out the night before our vacation to plan our route and it was my mother’s responsibility to direct him while he was driving the next day. With out this direction we would waste time, gas and money. Even though gas was about 30c a gallon back then, our vacation time was much more valuable. Today we plug the address into the GPS and take off but we still have a direction.

The beginning of creating and building a custom home is no different. It must begin with some time spent mapping out where we are going and where we want to be when we are complete. Although there will be detours along the way and sometimes the things we want initially are changed by factors such as time and budget, we need to know where we are going. This critical phase in the home design process is called programming. Throughout this section we will review the things that you should be thinking about as we begin your design and I will give you a form to aid in this process.

Lifestyle:

There are a great number of factors that determine how you function on a daily basis and how you will function in the years to come. Do you have children? How many? What age are they and how long will they be living in your home? (Provided they don’t come back after college) Do or will these children have vehicles? How many? How long? How long do you plan to live in the house? Is selling the house in the foreseeable future a design factor? Do you have guests or parents that may be visiting or maybe living with you in the future?

This list can go on forever but you begin to understand the variables that affect every home design I create. Until you sit down and begin to think about all of these elements it is impossible to create a home that will work for you both now and in the years to come. A few minutes spent filling out the programming sheet or across the table from an architect will answer a lot of these initial questions and begin our road map for the design of your home.

Scale and Size:

I recommend with all of my custom clients that they take some inventory of the room sizes of the home in which they are currently living. My wife has been married to an Architect (fortunately me) for the last 26 years but if I tell her a room on a plan is 18’x18’, it means nothing to her. If I tell her the same room is about the size of our existing Family room she immediately has a reference point to understand the room on the floor plan drawing. Simple, rough dimensions of major rooms really help in making the lines on a floor plan sketch come to life. Also pay attention to heights of ceilings, doorways and other vertical dimensions in a home. We will discuss the correct proportions of these spaces in future chapters but understanding what you currently have is the key to understanding what we are creating.

Predicting the future:

No one knows what will happen in the future but just like your retirement investments we need to invest some thought into how your home will age with you and your family. More and more I am being asked to design for aging in place. When these factors are considered early in the design process it is easy to incorporate the features that will make your home work for you in the future.

Sometimes I am asked to design a home that the homeowner plans to live in for a few years and then move on to another home. When this is the program I need to design the home so that it will appeal to the widest range of homebuyers when it is time to sell. I still create a custom home but I will notify the homeowner if we are putting in or leaving out elements that could affect the marketability of the home.

How does it look:

For several years I made presentations to various homebuilder groups on a wide range of architecturally related subjects. This was a valuable learning experience for me but one of the most critical things I learned was the value of visual aids in any presentation. I could stand in front of a room of 100 builders and say “ English Country Architecture” and each builder would immediately have a different image in his head. But if I showed them a picture of what I considered to be English Country Architecture we were all on the same page.

With that in mind as you begin to think about your new home take pictures or tear out photographs from magazines that illustrate the character of the home you want.

These do not need to be full photographs that show exactly the way you want your home to look. They can be a window, dormer, gable, entry, stone or any other element that helps to convey the “character” that you are after. It is the architect’s job to interpret these elements and incorporate these into an exterior design that works with your plan and “feels” the way you want your home to feel. But just like the builders I spoke with, a visual aid speeds up the process of getting architect and homeowner on the same page.

How much does it cost:

In designing custom homes for the past 28 years I have fewer than 2 or 3 clients that truly had no budget and could afford to build whatever they wanted. So budget is a critical element in the design of essentially every home I design. As with any other element of programming it is important to establish a budget very early in the process. Every decision that is made in a home from the first time you consider building, will affect the budget. I focus on this because if I design a home that you cannot afford then all we have is a pretty set of drawings and I am much more focused on creating beautiful homes than creating beautiful drawings. Budgets vary and are modified during the construction process but they must be entered into your GPS before we begin this journey.

I have included a programming form that should be helpful in establishing your program and forcing you to think about design elements that you may not have thought about previously. You will not have a definite answer to everything on this form but it will start your thought process and will jump start the design process with your architect. This form is beneficial to the homeowner who is thinking of purchasing a pre designed home as well. If you fill out the form and send it to our office we can help narrow the selection process of the available homes that meet your needs.

For a printable version – Custom Home Program Worksheet

This is the first in a multiple part series relating to the design and construction of great houses. Hopefully this has been helpful but please feel free to comment or e-mail us if you have any questions or thoughts.