So you’re thinking about building a new home.
When you’re building a new home one of the first things you are going to be concerned about is your budget and certainly the cost of building these days always seems to keep creeping up.
Well, I’m certainly one who has been a little critical about a latest design trend, namely tiny homes, like, who wants to live in a caravan?
However, when you think things through, one thing that the Tiny Home movement has achieved is to make people think about the size of the home that they really need and while this solution may not be tiny, it may well be smaller.
Good design does mean that you can save space with all those unwanted corridors deleted from the plan for example. What this means is that you’re not paying for it for all those unwanted square metres in simple terms. For many years this is one way I’ve promoted the value of working with a good architect. Our houses have always been space efficient and relatively compact that doesn’t mean to say you can’t enjoy the space around you.
Working with some new clients recently we had many several good design meetings about the planning and what we would say is that the client never asked one question about the size of the home. The plan was working so well we never had to ask.
This can play out in two ways, you do have to keep an eye on the size of the plan of course, but a space efficient plan is quite likely to be smaller than you think. Sometimes we don’t ask the client how big they think that Home should be. If we do, this often leads to an estimate of space which is bigger than they need.
This brings me to a pet phrase of mine – ‘Right-sizing’ !! There’s no shame in this and it sounds a lot more positive than ‘down-sizing’.! We have always considered right-sizing more ‘Resource efficient’ and therefore more in line with our focus on sustainable design.!
So, the solution may not be tiny but it could well be right sized to fit your needs and your budget…
Cheers, Russell
