A Field Guide to Designing Your Own Home
A Residential Architect explains the process of designing a home.
This journey is not for the faint of heart. It is a collaborative endeavor and assembling your team is critical to the process. Much of the process can be compared to preparing a garden bed or a meal. The planning and ingredients are as critical as the execution.
Seeds: Conceptual Design
The collecting of heirloom seeds, core prompts and influences sifted to separate wants, needs, scope, program, budget analysis, and site possibilities. The Architect and Owners dream, sketch, and explore and map out a course.
Unfolding: Schematic Design
Through attending to the gathered Seeds and working through the rich knowledge gained through practice, the Architect develops ideas into a visually cohesive scheme through sketch plans and watercolor renderings. Attending continues as Architect and client gather round and revise, layer and fine tune. Loose sketching and watercolor communicates the core scheme at scale but encompassing nuance and wonder.
Diggin In: Budget Analysis
The team welcomes new membership with trades and general contractors, landscape and interior designers. The soil is enriched and the journey takes on new momentum as budget and constructability are woven into consideration.
Taking Root: Design Development
The Architect and designers work in detail to refine, enhance and ultimately communicate the selected design to the trades who will craft it. Once the walls and envelope are set, the team begins layering materials and fine detail. The gestalt is achieved by fluency in vernacular and language, and attention to material and code specific details. Measured drawings and virtual models seek to represent the design. The Owners collaborate with the Architect and Designers to pick exterior materials and build a palette to inform further selections.
Becoming: Construction Documents
Through specific and precise drawings including engineered elements, the Architectural team assembles the plans, elevations, sections and details for permitting with local jurisdictions.
Tending: Construction Observation
Once plans are delivered and permitted your guide becomes your general contractor. The Architect and designers stay involved as the inevitable questions pop up, and together we celebrate the start of construction. The Architect visits the site at critical points within the build process, providing clarification and accommodating potential changes in direction.
Seasons: Patience
This is the most difficult part of the journey, and where the team you’ve assembled will rise and band together. The patience required is significant. to wait though delays, weather storms, revise budgets, problem solve and adapt. Here is the part of the journey where character and faith are paramount.
Harvest: Completion
The Architect walks with the Owner through the process, collaborating with creatives and trades, providing encouragement and continued partnership. The journey starts anew as the Owners begin to occupy and dwell within their uniquely crafted home: A light filled vessel, providing refuge and extending hospitality.
