Design is a conversation (describing a picture of your home)
A home often comes with reminders of traditional gables, chimneys, pieces of Colonials and Victorians, and our grandmother's house. You bring your old 35mm snapshots of historic estates and seashore cottages. You listen and in the end find a place for the hutch, the moose head, the sewing machine, the conversations and the Memories. We have all walked through houses that only exist in author’s imaginations: sea captain’s homes, medieval castles, antebellum plantation homes. It is because they have been described to us in vivid and exacting detail.
Big generalities And Litte Details
“I want it to look like a Federal Style Farmhouse. I want one of those spice racks that’s built in back of the cabinet door.” Your description needs to become like an old story, or rehearsed lines from a play. Build the story over days and days until you can recite it, walk thru your home, even if you are only recreating your master bathroom. Then it will be much easier to put your ideas to paper!
An Illustration
“Picture a house designed in the American Picturesque Cottage Style, a square footprint, two stories with vertical board and batten siding, a shallow hipped roof with a front elevation that features a steep gable at the center (a full third of the house width) with gingerbread waves from eave to ridge, and a carpenter style cross-shaped bracket at its peak. At the attic a skinny rectangular window, below a double casement flanked by shutters topped by a gothic arch with carved details. Similar windows and shutters are centered on each side.
"At the first floor, a porch extends within several feet of each corner and is divided into three bays. The supporting posts are decorative, almost lattice-like with stamped-out Xs. The porch has a flat roof with a short railing structure. The center third extends out to accentuate bell shaped newels at each corner. The porch’s front entry door is heavy with a raised panel design, and topped with a simple pediment with shallow arched opening and arched top. The first floor windows are decorated in similar fashion. The second floor windows tuck up to the eaves with only enough space to simply trim out the window frame.
"A brick chimney sits to the left of the gable, back a third of the way into the roof, constructed as two brick columns (in plan intersecting diamonds), each topped with tall clay pots. On the same side of the house a large bay dominates. It has a flat roof with heavy moldings which step up and out from the tops of the shuttered windows. Every window in the house has diamond shaped grids."
Now go to your public library (the process of design should be full of assignments that can be completed there) and research the Henry Delamater House by Alexander Jackson Davis in Rhinebeck, New York, 1844. Did you have that picture in your mind with only this 300-word description? Imagine what you can create once you have a 3,000-word description of your home.
Are You Ready To Put Pencil To Paper?
You must work to prepare in great detail and precision a description of your home before you attempt to put mechanical pencil to drafting board.
Brian J. Pilling - Brian J. Pilling, AIA has designed over 200 custom homes and renovations for primary and vacation home buyers. He graduated from ...
