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.