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Translating Your Ideas into a Great Home
The process of designing any home, whether it is a
log home, a timber frame home, a post and beam home, or a straw bale home
involves all the faculties of mind. It includes left brain analytical thinking
and right brain creativity and visualization. It involves examining
your likes and dislikes. It requires honest communication—with
your spouse and/or children, with your designer/architect and builders, and
with your banker. On the creative side, it means learning and taking
the time to visualize your finished home from the inside out: the
feel of each room, corner and hallway, bathroom, kitchen—in short, what it will
be like to live there.
As we begin the process of designing your new
log or timber frame or post and beam home, being able to visualize your home can be a great
asset. We wish to help you to clearly understand spatially the home
in which you are eventually going to live. The result will not only
be a better design, but also a less expensive process. Many design
firms jump quickly to the construction documents. We believe this
is a tragic waste of your precious investment in your home. If you
are not able to fully comprehend the inner environment of your home,
you will more than likely be making changes to the design as you
‘get the picture,’ adding substantially to the design
cost or unnecessary compromises. Even more frightening is the possibility
of not understanding your home until it is under construction—or
until after you have moved in. Being able to visualize your home
in detail is a learned process. Our guidance and technological aids
can be an invaluable part to this process.
As designers, we assume the role of translators.
You likely bring a diverse collection of images and ideas from a
variety of sources: magazines, homes you have seen, images you may
have carried in your mind for years. These carry with them an emotional
response. The better you are at describing the mental pictures and
the emotional response they evoke, the better we will be able to
translate the images and ideas into a great home. In the beginning,
we place less emphasis on the technological representations we can
provide and more on your ability to 'think' visually. Our role is
to expand upon your vision, employing inspiration and creativity
to create a home greater than the sum of its parts. We then translate
this back to you through a model or computer-generated images that
should confirm the success of the initial design process.
The most important contributions to our designs,
whether they be the complex geometry of circular rooms or a simple bathroom or kitchen,
come directly from our ability to visualize.
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