How To Design Your First Home

The design of a house is an essential factor for homeowners as well as Architects. It will affect their mood and lifestyle. Architects visualizing designing a home as the client is often a great way to proceed. The design should be aesthetically pleasing, functional, and sustainable, and have the personality of home for the owner. These are the challenges to create Architecture that feels like home.

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It is important to note that this article will not cover all aspects of designing your first home, but instead we will focus on how to design an exterior and interior space.

The key to designing a house is to understand the principles of residential architecture. These principles are based on human needs and comfort levels and they vary from one culture to another.

Having designed built homes for dozens of clients with premium crafting, I have some idea of residential Architecture’s complexity. But its the universal nature that anyone can get the gist of.

A good place to start is by deciding what kind of home you want. This will help narrow down your options, making it easier to select from the many styles available on the market today. You can pick up a few magazines or Pinterest pages to see what things look like, and you can do some local viewings to pick up the feel.

The next step is figuring out how much space you need, which will depend on how many people are living in the house, their ages and what activities they enjoy doing together at home. You also need to consider how much storage space you need or if there are any special features that might be important for your family’s needs. A typical home with 1 Bedroom starts at 1,500 to 2,000 square feet, increasing per bedroom and feature space.

If you purchased land, this is the point where you can see how many square feet will fir your site. The city zoning setbacks and easements will next give you limits.

At this stage, the Architecture process kicks in. You can use these points to layout a program and give it general form. You can guess at materials from the style and how you want the space to feel. With a few iterations, or meetings if you are designing for others, you should have a solid plan and building direction.

You then should be ready to at meet with contractors who can price the square footage.

And the rest will be history. With some hard questions and decisions, and much development, your home design will become something that functions.

This can’t be made easier at the start as each home is different. But after designing one, you will be set for your next project, learning the basics of making a house and a home.

Start designing your 1st home with our Residential Design In Revit Course below.