That you can pull images from magazines and basically collage them together (ie. "I want this floor, with this cabinet, with this fireplace, etc") and make a good house.
the best house is huge, with a 3-4 car attached garage, and finished basement (rec room with a home theater and wet bar). Clad in your choice of neo-mediterrrean, neo-traditional, or neo-missionary... And a huge fricking mass of a roof.
Every bedroom needs its own walk-in closet, plus a million extra closets everywhere else, because even though we don't have possessions NOW, we would like to own so much crap that it just gets stuffed throughout our home to clog up our spaces and never be seen or used again.
I could certainly DESIGN a great house in less than 9 months (if it was the ONLY thing that I was working on).
But to put together a complete set of CD's, nope. And Residential is 90% of what we do. Our commercial work is a significantly faster process, as far as we can tell with our little experience.
Our typical sets for a new house are +/- 50 sheets and a spec book.
Not only that, but we do not work alone. We usually meet our clients once every 2 weeks or so, which means that a 9 month design process is only 18 meetings or so. Which is not that much when you are making decisions about soup spoons and other minutae (sp?).
Sure, I can crank out a new house in very little time if we did what we consider "spec house" type work. But we don't.
-that everybody wants to live in a traditional house...except for people who live in the city who must want to live in "lofts"
-that a 4,000 sf house built "green" is more sustainable than a 1,200 sf house that's not green at all
-that a snap in plastic grille makes a window look better
-that people actually use jacuzzi type tubs
as for closets...i've never understood what the obsession is with walk-ins. i'd rather have a standard 24" deep closet where everythings's right there when you open the door. even better if it's fitted out with custom casework like bi-level hanging, shoe racks, drawers, etc.
that the more gables on the front of the house, the better the house is "asthetically".
i have only done one house that reaches near 50 pages, the rest are wham, bam, thank you mam 15-20 with no spec book. People in my area just dont want to pay the money needed to do a set of 50+ drawings for a house.
thank you "big three".
Dude- I ve seen awsome houses drawn on a piece of plywood as were disassembling the form work for the foundations. Granted - this was the Boss's house, a sort of experiment in interior bridges.
I wouldnt recomend this method for anything other than insane people.
-that each house must be on a 2+ acre lot with a vast, unuseable front yard, and that the house must be set high up on a hill (even though every other house in the subdivision, err, neighborhood is also on a hill) and that it must either be clad in brick or have a "farmer's porch" despite the fact that it's distance from the road and other houses make such port meaningless
-that a "Paladian" window and a soaring two-story foyer make a house "colonial" (I love that one)
-that bigger is better, as is gaudier (however it's spelt)
-that fake, plastic pseudo-colonial detailing is better than simple elegance
-that air conditioning beats proper siting anyday
-that a prefab pseudo-colonial house from a catalog fits great anywhere.. I love this one, because I live on a small lake back home and some folks down the street knocked down the little cottage on their property a few years back and put up a prefab two-story pseudo-colonial. first of all, they had to knock down every tree on the once beautifully wooded property up to the house to get the cranes in, but what's great is how out of place the house looks especially from the lakeside. it's completely out of scale with all the other houses and it's the only house that doesn't have nice, big windows on the backside to take advantage of the view
tyvek, your firm sounds like my firm. The last three houses we did were all interior guts and renovations of +/- 3600 s.f. vertical brownstones, each is around 90+ sheets of 18x24. plus the spec book is insane and we are literally on site about once every 2 or 3 days max. We have weekly client meetings, with one client is much more frequent than that unfortunately, and biweekly design meetings. SO MUCH TIME TO DO IT RIGHT!!!!!
-that the more, different materials, the better
(let's put granite countertops in, with patterned tile backsplash, ooooh how about some cherry cabinets, and maybe an oak floor with mahogany picture frame, oh and some exposed brick on the wall, next to some plaster, some stainless steel appliances, oh and the eat in kitchen area should be red mexican tile!)
FLM, don't forget that a soaring two-story foyer also makes a house "Italianate"! Oh and it ALSO makes it "Tudor"! OH and it ALSo makes it "French Country"! Oh and...
* make sure that the shitter is not visible upon opening the bathroom door.
* make yet another compartment in already tight bathroom for the shitter. (whats this obsession with always hiding the toilet anyway?)
haha. around here (New Hampshire) it only makes it "colonial." interesting how the exact same "architectural" technique has a completely different effect in other areas though
:) You should head to Orange County and check out all the great "Spanish Colonial" (?!) houses. They are the zenith of residential construction!!! I myself am just hoping to secure a $900,000 mortgage for one. Some day, FLM, some day.
* vast sample rooms with colorful fabrics, lam plastics, carpets etc on walls, regularly stocked by 'oh so important reps' in some architect's offices, that is never used.
that anything with rooms inside of the roof structure is "cape cod" .
we once did a strict georgian home for a client and it was denied by the subdivision design committee because it was to traditional and, i quote "not enough gables on the front elevation of the house" it was a struggle to convince the committee that they were complete morons and should never be able to decide the worthiness or integrity of a home to put in there ilustrous community.
mcmansions...gotta love them.
I always try to talk people out of hiding the toilet, but rarely succeed. I don't get it, but hey, different strokes for different folks - I do tend to leave the bathroom door open all the time anyway...
"you only need expensive materials on the front, no one looks at the sides and the back of your house anywaysâ€, spend the money on the main entry to show people you are successful. “don't forget to be beautiful, it must me symmetricalâ€
pomo, i do cook and i worked in restaurant kitchen as chef's assistant during my architecture schooling. here is something my distant cousin started in archinect.link
* putting massive amounts of glass in the house only to be curtained/screened somehow and never opened later.
* people thinking they are going to live just like in that design magazine picture. life imitating photo shoot. i think there was a thread about this. no?
Didn't mean to hijack the thread with the 50 page set thing.
But. . . for us the sets include interiors and electrical which we do on every job (we don't do mechanical drawings, just performance specs), but does not include structurals. Most often they are on 24x36 sheets. Last night I completed a construction set of 43 pages on 30x42 (which I hate)and it has been 14 months since I was first hired. That project is about 3.5 mil.
Cost. . .we typically give our "oppinion of probable construction cost" at $450 per square foot. But that could go up (harder to go down from there in our area). But, it is different in other areas of the country due to the geographic nature of shitter prices.
• that switching to double-paned windows will make a huge energy savings in a gutted and newly rebuilt house, and that there are no downsides to this
• that the code is useful and infallible, even though no two people can agree on what it means in practice
• that a bigger washing machine means a better wash
• that cheap plumbing fixtures are a cost savings.
* the ambulance chaser deserve the best.
* while the meeting your hi end residential design boss included you with hi end client (hi rear end in both designations), going real well and you're thinking of getting 'your' 2 cents design ideas in and feeling important and everything, boss sends you to make xerox copy of something that is not necessary right then.
i love it when materials don't wrap the skin of a home. abruptly stops at the front edge and is met with crappy r.s. cedar and vinyl siding. what a nice detail...classy.
we cram so much on each of our sheets that we usually get by with around 20-30 sheets depending on how crazy we get with details and schedules.
good stuff
* lavatories that sit on a counter represents the hi design for some and usually named as designer series or architectural line.
* you can throw in some 'whimsy' when it comes to 'powder' rooms.
If I could afford a house with a Jacuzzi I'd use it every God-damn day !!! (no shit, whether the shitter is behind a wall or not!) Please be considerate of the plumber. Some architects design a house like a bad lawnmower designer...you know, the asshole that makes it so you have to take the engine apart to change the oil !!! How about walk-out basements... so all the side yards are eroded mudslides and when you use a push mower to cut the grass people get their goddamn feet cut-off slipping down the slope! How about builders who let the dumb ass carpenters use "utility-grade" studs so the walls are all warped and out of plumb.
Residential Design Myths
* refrigerator, stove and sink are most functional when on a triangular positioning.
* feng shui is better than formica
* everything has to line up
That anyone can do it because after all everyone lives in a house, right? What more experience do you need?
that you need a kitchen (but maybe that's just me)
Every bedroom needs its own bathroom.
That you can pull images from magazines and basically collage them together (ie. "I want this floor, with this cabinet, with this fireplace, etc") and make a good house.
Also, related to a recent thread. . .
That you can design a great house in less than 9 months (without a team of 3 or more).
tyvek, you cant design a great house in less than 9 months by yourself?
the best house is huge, with a 3-4 car attached garage, and finished basement (rec room with a home theater and wet bar). Clad in your choice of neo-mediterrrean, neo-traditional, or neo-missionary... And a huge fricking mass of a roof.
combining floor plans that seem interesting will inevitably make a great house
Every bedroom needs its own walk-in closet, plus a million extra closets everywhere else, because even though we don't have possessions NOW, we would like to own so much crap that it just gets stuffed throughout our home to clog up our spaces and never be seen or used again.
I have a plan, can you stamp my drawings?
I could certainly DESIGN a great house in less than 9 months (if it was the ONLY thing that I was working on).
But to put together a complete set of CD's, nope. And Residential is 90% of what we do. Our commercial work is a significantly faster process, as far as we can tell with our little experience.
Our typical sets for a new house are +/- 50 sheets and a spec book.
Not only that, but we do not work alone. We usually meet our clients once every 2 weeks or so, which means that a 9 month design process is only 18 meetings or so. Which is not that much when you are making decisions about soup spoons and other minutae (sp?).
Sure, I can crank out a new house in very little time if we did what we consider "spec house" type work. But we don't.
-that everybody wants to live in a traditional house...except for people who live in the city who must want to live in "lofts"
-that a 4,000 sf house built "green" is more sustainable than a 1,200 sf house that's not green at all
-that a snap in plastic grille makes a window look better
-that people actually use jacuzzi type tubs
as for closets...i've never understood what the obsession is with walk-ins. i'd rather have a standard 24" deep closet where everythings's right there when you open the door. even better if it's fitted out with custom casework like bi-level hanging, shoe racks, drawers, etc.
* 'great' houses are harder to design, take more than a year and you have to draw 50+ pages of drawings and a thick spec book.
that the more gables on the front of the house, the better the house is "asthetically".
i have only done one house that reaches near 50 pages, the rest are wham, bam, thank you mam 15-20 with no spec book. People in my area just dont want to pay the money needed to do a set of 50+ drawings for a house.
thank you "big three".
that you must have a formal dining room. please, we eat in front of the television if we eat in at all... and my wifes in culinary school.
That you need blueprints.
Dude- I ve seen awsome houses drawn on a piece of plywood as were disassembling the form work for the foundations. Granted - this was the Boss's house, a sort of experiment in interior bridges.
I wouldnt recomend this method for anything other than insane people.
Oh my freaking god... what size paper are these fifty sheet sets on?
-that each house must be on a 2+ acre lot with a vast, unuseable front yard, and that the house must be set high up on a hill (even though every other house in the subdivision, err, neighborhood is also on a hill) and that it must either be clad in brick or have a "farmer's porch" despite the fact that it's distance from the road and other houses make such port meaningless
-that a "Paladian" window and a soaring two-story foyer make a house "colonial" (I love that one)
-that bigger is better, as is gaudier (however it's spelt)
-that fake, plastic pseudo-colonial detailing is better than simple elegance
-that air conditioning beats proper siting anyday
-that a prefab pseudo-colonial house from a catalog fits great anywhere.. I love this one, because I live on a small lake back home and some folks down the street knocked down the little cottage on their property a few years back and put up a prefab two-story pseudo-colonial. first of all, they had to knock down every tree on the once beautifully wooded property up to the house to get the cranes in, but what's great is how out of place the house looks especially from the lakeside. it's completely out of scale with all the other houses and it's the only house that doesn't have nice, big windows on the backside to take advantage of the view
ha ha ha, so true!
tyvek, your firm sounds like my firm. The last three houses we did were all interior guts and renovations of +/- 3600 s.f. vertical brownstones, each is around 90+ sheets of 18x24. plus the spec book is insane and we are literally on site about once every 2 or 3 days max. We have weekly client meetings, with one client is much more frequent than that unfortunately, and biweekly design meetings. SO MUCH TIME TO DO IT RIGHT!!!!!
i've worked on 50+ sheet houses.
SUXXX.
the biggest lesson i learned at that job was to make sure that the shitter is not visible upon opening the bathroom door.
Control your client or they will haunt you.
-that the more, different materials, the better
(let's put granite countertops in, with patterned tile backsplash, ooooh how about some cherry cabinets, and maybe an oak floor with mahogany picture frame, oh and some exposed brick on the wall, next to some plaster, some stainless steel appliances, oh and the eat in kitchen area should be red mexican tile!)
FLM, don't forget that a soaring two-story foyer also makes a house "Italianate"! Oh and it ALSO makes it "Tudor"! OH and it ALSo makes it "French Country"! Oh and...
* make sure that the shitter is not visible upon opening the bathroom door.
* make yet another compartment in already tight bathroom for the shitter. (whats this obsession with always hiding the toilet anyway?)
haha. around here (New Hampshire) it only makes it "colonial." interesting how the exact same "architectural" technique has a completely different effect in other areas though
:) You should head to Orange County and check out all the great "Spanish Colonial" (?!) houses. They are the zenith of residential construction!!! I myself am just hoping to secure a $900,000 mortgage for one. Some day, FLM, some day.
* vast sample rooms with colorful fabrics, lam plastics, carpets etc on walls, regularly stocked by 'oh so important reps' in some architect's offices, that is never used.
IMITATION PRODUCTS: "It looks just like the real thing, even better."
Corian is both a cost savings and a quality improvement over stone. Oh, and it's not at all bad for the environment.
IT IS CHEAPER TO REMODEL THAN TO BUILD FROM SCRATCH.
Just curious how much a house with 50 sheets cost to build. I am fishing to compare. I have done that but it also includes Mech / Elec / Interiors.
that anything with rooms inside of the roof structure is "cape cod" .
we once did a strict georgian home for a client and it was denied by the subdivision design committee because it was to traditional and, i quote "not enough gables on the front elevation of the house" it was a struggle to convince the committee that they were complete morons and should never be able to decide the worthiness or integrity of a home to put in there ilustrous community.
mcmansions...gotta love them.
* that your residential design boss tells you to go all the way with his losely drawn facade detailo, he basically wants you to hardline it..
abra - Im hiding a toilet in behind a privacy wall within a bathroom as we speak. This about the third or fourth this month.
I always try to talk people out of hiding the toilet, but rarely succeed. I don't get it, but hey, different strokes for different folks - I do tend to leave the bathroom door open all the time anyway...
mr. evil (i love the name), tore that wall down and tell your clients that their shit is not precious..
Abra, you don't cook do you?
the house that i was working on with the 50+ set was something like 1.4 million...
on shitters:
my favorite client ever was the one who wanted to place the ironing board so that it folded out over the shitter.
why read when you can iron?!
"you only need expensive materials on the front, no one looks at the sides and the back of your house anywaysâ€, spend the money on the main entry to show people you are successful. “don't forget to be beautiful, it must me symmetricalâ€
pomo, i do cook and i worked in restaurant kitchen as chef's assistant during my architecture schooling. here is something my distant cousin started in archinect.link
wow, I have never heard of this hiding the toilet thing. How absurd.
That viny is maintenance free.
until it fades and cracks under years of UV
* putting massive amounts of glass in the house only to be curtained/screened somehow and never opened later.
* people thinking they are going to live just like in that design magazine picture. life imitating photo shoot. i think there was a thread about this. no?
Didn't mean to hijack the thread with the 50 page set thing.
But. . . for us the sets include interiors and electrical which we do on every job (we don't do mechanical drawings, just performance specs), but does not include structurals. Most often they are on 24x36 sheets. Last night I completed a construction set of 43 pages on 30x42 (which I hate)and it has been 14 months since I was first hired. That project is about 3.5 mil.
Cost. . .we typically give our "oppinion of probable construction cost" at $450 per square foot. But that could go up (harder to go down from there in our area). But, it is different in other areas of the country due to the geographic nature of shitter prices.
• that switching to double-paned windows will make a huge energy savings in a gutted and newly rebuilt house, and that there are no downsides to this
• that the code is useful and infallible, even though no two people can agree on what it means in practice
• that a bigger washing machine means a better wash
• that cheap plumbing fixtures are a cost savings.
* the ambulance chaser deserve the best.
* while the meeting your hi end residential design boss included you with hi end client (hi rear end in both designations), going real well and you're thinking of getting 'your' 2 cents design ideas in and feeling important and everything, boss sends you to make xerox copy of something that is not necessary right then.
i love it when materials don't wrap the skin of a home. abruptly stops at the front edge and is met with crappy r.s. cedar and vinyl siding. what a nice detail...classy.
we cram so much on each of our sheets that we usually get by with around 20-30 sheets depending on how crazy we get with details and schedules.
good stuff
* lavatories that sit on a counter represents the hi design for some and usually named as designer series or architectural line.
* you can throw in some 'whimsy' when it comes to 'powder' rooms.
-lets hear some for the powder rooms..
If I could afford a house with a Jacuzzi I'd use it every God-damn day !!! (no shit, whether the shitter is behind a wall or not!) Please be considerate of the plumber. Some architects design a house like a bad lawnmower designer...you know, the asshole that makes it so you have to take the engine apart to change the oil !!! How about walk-out basements... so all the side yards are eroded mudslides and when you use a push mower to cut the grass people get their goddamn feet cut-off slipping down the slope! How about builders who let the dumb ass carpenters use "utility-grade" studs so the walls are all warped and out of plumb.
"You draw it I can build it!
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