Design

Simply Elegant Home Designs is offering a new service to help potential plan purchasers visualize their house plan within the context of their own site.  For a nominal fee they can provide images of the desired house plan at their site address.  The images below provide an example of how this can work.  They depict various google earth views which increasingly zoom in on a specific site address in which a 3d house plan model has been inserted. This service can be particularly helpful for a potential plan purchaser because it allows them to get an idea of how the house plan might fit into their own unique site location prior to purchasing the full plan set.  Also, because google earth provides 3d terrain, it can also help to understand grading issues or identify special foundation conditions that might be required.   Simply Elegant Home Designs offers pre -designed home plans that are creative, simple, elegant, unique and green to individuals, builders and developers.   Their goal is ...

Architects have many great tools that they can work with.  And under skilled hands they can be a great benefit to their clients.  One such tool is a software program called Google Sketchup .  Sketchup is a 3d modeling program that is surprisingly easy to use.  The images you see below are of a house designed by  Larson Brenner Architects in Stillwater, Minnesota.  The images represent a series of color studies that were performed with Sketchup.  The basic design had already been completed and we were now at the stage of finalizing materials and colors for the roofing, walls, windows.  The top image is pretty much where we ended up and the images below represent the various intermittent studies. Pretty cool huh?  It is a great way to visualize your end product.  For more sketchup examples you can see the plans at  Simply Elegant Home Designs

I ran across this totally factual article the other day.  Could not resist posting the link. Architects are sexy!

In my real job (non-blogging) I am finding that more and more people are interested in building a more environmentally responsible and healthy home.   Leaving political discussions and arguments about “climate change” behind (I don’t like being preached to and I don’t like preaching), I believe there are many common sense reasons to build a “Green” home .   Here are two pretty good ones: Save you money $$$ in the long run Reduce your stress level – improve your quality of life If you want to build a Green Home there is an abundant amount of information available to you.   But start investigating Green and you begin to realize there can be a daunting number of decisions to make – and they all impact your construction budget in some way.   Building Green can start to look incredibly complicated and expensive - and neither of these notions is inherently “Green”.   Well it does not  have to work that way. So what I want to do, starting with this posting is to help you simp...

Hiring an Architect to design a one of a kind home for you can be a time consuming and expensive endeavor.  The design process will take at least several months - maybe up to a year.  And the fee can run from 8% to 12% of the construction cost or even higher.  That being said I believe it is well worth it - but not everyone has that luxury of time and money.  So what I want to do here is present you with an alternative approach that can work for many people. The basic concept is to purchase a set of plans "off the shelf" directly from an Architect, and then work with them to customize that plan to your specific needs and tastes.  The two images below depict a house designed by Larson Brenner Architects in Stillwater , Minnesota.   It is a beautiful Cape Cod design. The client loved the design inside and out.  But the plan would not fit on their own lot configuration, the room arrangement did not satisfy 100% of their needs and their aesthetic tastes tended more towards the ...