A home is so much more than just walls and windows, rooms and doors. A home is a refuge after a long day at work; a place for gatherings on the weekends; a place to cook your favorite meal. A home is a place for family, and a place that creates memories both happy and sad. Your home becomes a reflection of your personality by what you hang on its walls, the colors you paint its rooms, and the furniture you put inside.
An architect by training understands the importance of place and the deep significance of ‘home’. Every home has a unique set of qualities, both tangible and intangible, that are reflective of its occupants. If you choose to work with an architect on a residential design project, you can expect to have someone committed to creating livable spaces that are sensitive to your daily life.
Whether building a brand-new home, adding a new-addition, or remodeling an existing home, working with an architect is a highly collaborative process that helps brings a homeowner’s vision to reality. The architect’s primary role is to critically listen, understand the programmatic and spatial needs, and implement creative and functional design solutions that fit in with the surrounding context.
One of the most beneficial aspects of working with an architect on a residential project is the ability for the homeowner to explore and test several different solutions early in the design process. By weighing the pros and cons of several design approaches, the homeowner can be confident the direction they are choosing works best for their budget, functional needs, and aesthetic preferences.
Often the homeowner will have a rough idea of what their overall goals are. The architect’s role is to elevate these ideas into real solutions - bringing scale, clarity, and a sense of harmony to all the programmatic elements of the project. The architect will also present new ideas and solutions the homeowner may have never considered. “Visual Listening” is an exercise where the homeowner and architect will review a broad range of visual styles, materials, textures, and spaces, and pull out images that resonate in a particular way. This helps to shape an aesthetic vision for the project - creating a database for design inspiration throughout the process. This collaborative back-and-forth between the homeowner and architect is where a project really comes to life.
Traditionally, pen and paper has been the primary means of communicating design ideas between the architect and homeowner. Floor plans, or blueprints, can often be challenging to read for homeowners that have never seen architectural drawings before. In recent years, 3-Dimensional computer modeling and rendering capabilities have elevated this line of communication, giving the homeowner the ability to better visualize designs, both spatially and materialistically. Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more and more prevalent in architectural practice. With this technology, 3-Dimensional models can literally be inhabited by the homeowner, giving them the ability to walk around the model with 360-degree views. This gives a much better sense of scale and proportion, and an understanding of how daylight affects different spaces. In many cases, architects themselves are using VR as a design tool, as it is compatible with standard software already common in the architectural office.
Working with an architect on a residential project has many great advantages that allow a homeowner to draw from an expansive tool set as they begin their project. If you are dreaming of a residential project, large or small, let Firm Ground Architects help you realize the full potential of your project, and make your house feel like ‘Home’.