Part 2: Imagine the Possibilities
Guest Feature by Richard Taylor, AIA

More of this Feature • 1. Secrets of Home Design • 3. Search Your Soul

Related Resources • Do You Need an Architect? • How to Work With An Architect • Find Plans for Your Dream Home

Click & View Designing for the way we really live: Richard Taylor Architects    Your Turn Be a Guest Writer for this site. Send us your essay about architecture and design.

...But all of these available design tools are too rarely used to create homes that are molded to the lives of their owners. Instead, homebuyers find themselves having to choose from among a few floor plans designed to appeal to a broad market, and then struggling to give it personality and character with just paint, carpet, and furniture. We try to make a house “ours” with features and decorating and never consider that it is the architectural design itself that brings a house to life.

We lose sight of what’s possible and end up with just another house instead of a home.

Designing and building a new home is an opportunity to create something brand new, something unique, something as individual as you. We’re working on several homes that defy any stylistic categorization because their inspiration, their “style” comes from the lives that their owners lead. These homes are built with character as the major construction material – the architecture and the “decorating” can’t be separated.

Houses like these are so much more than just the number of bedrooms and the size of the floor plan – they’re the ones that you return to look at again and again and think, “wow, there’s something about that house that I really like”. What you like about those houses is the result of the owners having taken an active role in creating the design from the very beginning. They realize that homes are made of life, of love, of memories, of wishes, and of spaces -- not of living rooms, crown molding, and draperies.

Our conversations with these clients don’t begin with, “how many bedrooms do you need?” or “how big of a house do you want?”, they start with “what are your dreams and how do you want to live?”.

Those discussions, and the designs that evolve from them, are what a truly custom home is all about...

Next > What questions should you ask before you design your home?
Search Your Soul - > Page 1, 2, 3