puntloos

Thanks @NSS, to be honest that's exactly the type of feedback I am looking for, pieces of design that do not make sense. As an example, the 'coffee machine area' to the left of the big hallway door is really an artifact of me trying to both make the garage fit an actual car, as well as trying to have a pocket door.. problem: bifolding door between kitchen and dining could block it. Not completely sure what you mean though, are you saying if they step inside their foot might 'snag' onto the staircase and trip? To be clear, the design as attached is mine, where we like a lot of the principles, but we have asked our Architect to convert it into something 'professionally done' and fixing any mistakes. Your comment is def. something the Arch should hopefully fix, but good for me to be aware of it already..

Hmm, I guess I still don't quite understand the details of insulated enveloppes. I think I grasp the principle, you dont want a conductive piece of material between outside and inside, but presumably you can build the dropbox with the full wall thickness.. (although that might make it impractical.. This is quite cool. Maybe I can somehow put this somewhere unobtrusive and indeed solve it..

Anyone? Anyone? @Sensus, @Carrerahill, @Bueller? Is the link problematic or not working? Ground: - Note that the uplighters are just scattered evenly, no deep thought went into them - The first part of garage likely to be a carport 1st (but a lot less developed..) note that the walkway above the office gives a surprising amount of spacious feel to it. Is there some science to when a hallway feels 'grand'? My hunch is that the amount of distance between most high walls is the key thing. if we remove the dead end walkway because it's "useless" it feels much less nice..

How does one 'chat to planning officers'? You probably shouldn't track down where they live - are there actually office hours? Varies by location I guess?

We get quite a few parcels, and with both partners working, we're often not home. Was thinking: are there any low-tech or high-tech solutions one could build? Our current idea is this: Essentially an open box, that can be locked after leaving a parcel (by the deliveryguy, or perhaps digitally), whilst internally, a solid door too, that cna be only unlocked from within the house.

As any actual Architect will say, it depends a ton on your lifestyle. For example, my reality is that I only am in my 'lounge' (office) when I need to separate myself from my family and do work. at any other time, cooking, chatting, watching tv with family, so we have one main big living space, aimed at the sun as much as we can. Instead, if you plan to remove yourself from your kitchen area the moment you're done, then emphasis on the lounge makes a lot of sense. No truly right answer here I suspect. Your design sounds OK, it's just that I feel both areas are compromised a bit, where I personally would go for one non-compromising large area and just 'ignore' the other.

On a cursory glance, am I understanding the drawings correctly that they are proposing effectively only straight downlighters, and e.g. in the bathroom one single blaze of a thousand suns LED? What are the orange lines (e.g. in the bathroom a square, but in most rooms slightly more creative).. are they electrical lines that perhaps go to switches?

Reviving this topic a little, with one question: What are the options on building 'pillars' - in particular, in wood this seems doable enough, but is that the only material available for such custom work? Or could people make this with concrete? Bricks&plaster? Reason I ask: I'd like to attach, or possibly insert speakers into the pillars (for surround audio, ideally you'd want speakers straight from your side), but really carving out space for the speaker probably would make the pillar not strong enough to be supporting? -M

Thanks Mike, the angled part was indeed a point of contention earlier, but it has 'slightly meaningful' size at this point, and indeed the sun leaves our house at about 15:30, but leaves this space considerably later I'd say..

Hey all, As you might remember - Critique my Brief was received with some mixed thoughts, although our Architect was really enthusiastic about what we provided to her. (or at least she pretended to be ) We have received her initial designs, and based on this, we have extended our own design and put a lot of extra detail in there. Please note that I've spent next to 0 effort on picking 'the right' objects, e.g. lamp shades, hobs, paintings, materials for walls etc. Core thing to focus on is the shape and location of things. Would love to hear opinions. What do you think, in particular which things will never work, and which things should be really good? I've used a pretty cool presentation system for this - Focusky is free (up to a point, but I've only used the free version so far). It allows me to talk over stuff, give some commentary, then upload to the cloud for free.. and people can zoom around themselves too! It's pretty nifty. http://focusky.com/zcxt/kgig/?html5. (click away the right side-bar!) Final tip, the final slide (click bottom right) contains a ton of extra stuff, incl some renders, and the written summary for the various spots. [UPDATE]: reconciled many of the points & thoughts in a followup message

Take my comment with large amounts of salt, not an architect, but "clearly" it would be better if your fam/din/kit area was wider, but I guess it depends on which rooms you expect to be in, most of the time. My family primarily uses the family area and a lounge would be very occasional. If you're like me, then indeed emphasize living area. And, to me it seems you can: 1/ make straight stairs, running roughly from dining entrance to front door. 2/ Cloak/toilet under the stairs. 3/ Lounge takes a hit of say 1m - 3x4 isn't bad. Can even move the side wall a bit more to the right (with my suggested stair design) 4/ Utility will probably be compromised. I don't have a great answer there, but perhaps worth considering putting it behind the kitchen

All awesome stuff @Carrerahill - thanks. A few questions (not necessarily just to CH) What's your current take on 'smart lights'? While back in the day, only a select few houses (and vegas hotelrooms, for some reason..) offer some combination of light arrangements (different combinations of on/off and sometimes dimming, nowadays technically speaking it's pretty easy to literally have every light in your room be on a different color, brightness setting and change it at the drop of a hat, or even gradually change it along with the exact level of daylight that's out there. Is this all gimmickry? (is that a word?) Secondly, at what point should a lighting designer get involved? Would you have something helpful to contribute during the design phase of the house/rooms itself, or would you just work with what's there? For example I'm sure that you can do some funky things with walls, cornices, and during daytime the color of awnings, skylights.. Finally, many of us, I imagine, are on a budget. Of course the luxury of being able to afford your own home is nothing to complain about but if e.g. a lighting designer would cost me - say - more than 7000 they would be starting to rival an Architect (stage 1-3) .. I'm trying to work out if I can get a decent amount of advice at "somewhere below 5000" for the rooms I listed elsewhere - main living areas.. I don't need to PM, my current design is one 550lm smart(white spectrum wifi) downlight per sqm of ceiling space, what do you think! More seriously - I do hope at some point to have something a bit more concrete (although not sure if it's just my own design, or I can find someone to help..) and might just take up on your kind offer.

Am I assuming correctly that 5a is 5 Ampere? As in pretty low total wattage (which is fine w/ LEDs)? It does enter into my idea of designing my home to "power" every room with one central smart switch, so if I want to I can completely switch off an entire room with e.g. https://sonoff.tech/product/wifi-diy-smart-switches/powr2 - so I can even monitor how much power a room uses. (I realize that you can 'only' put 3300W worth of devices on this circuit, not quite sure yet how to make sure that doesn't become an issue, but I think/suspect only devices like vacuums, space heaters etc will start to add up meaningfully, perhaps having one dedicated 'power' socket for such appliances might work.. maybe?

Ha, already downloaded it - but haven't played with it enough, somehow currently I don't see a way to do the simplest things e.g. adding furniture, or specifying a non-rectangular room.. Suspect i'm missing some important 'draw toolbox' button. Anyway will report back once I know

Perhaps the thing to learn here is that opinions vary, even between partners, and having a flexible system is valuable. My parents have a *super* dark livingroom, even though there's a lot of windows facing south. Main reasons seem to be indeed no downlighters (older house), lots of dark wood, only a few pendants that are strictly speaking mostly pointing down too. I think this was/is my dad's doing who is fine with this.. whilst my mom keeps on complaining about the darkness.. I tend to agree with her, but indeed having a bit more individual control seems sensible here. ("why not both?")

Can you share your free design then? ? Would love to take a look...

I'll add to this topic rather than start my own - but I'd be interested in this too. I spoke to a commercial one sitting next to me on a plane, she only did things like offices etc, but in her opinion it might be worth a consult or two but there's a lot of handwaviness about. This all comes back to my earlier opinion where major benefits could be had if people who design lifestyle, lighting systems, architectural features all work together on some concerted vision based on real experience. Things like personal preferences, habits around the day, angles of light, artworks that need to be custom-lit etc etc could be accounted for but in practice I think more often than not you get sold a lot of nothing where people just charge for making up some random Feng Sui type line of fantasy. One thing she did tell me is to not 'just' go for a matrix of downlighters. Great for cleaning but if you want atmosphere, light the walls. I should also have her recommendation on a good london-area guy if I can dig it out.. let me know if you want me to see if I can find it.. Anyone else opinions?

So in this case, you'd either want to go "All In" with the basement as the slab, or 'not at all' perhaps, since just doing a small (35m2) basement would still need a slab anyway for passivehaus reasons? What do traditional foundations cost? E.g. the bare minimum on normal clay? The info I have (but should do an inspection) is that we have chalk deep down, but "reddish brown flinty clay" of up to 40feet, covered by 1ft of silt. Ah that's what I have to work with as well. ("ish" - a bit more perhaps if I leave a tiny bit of access, try for internal scaffolding etc etc. It's strange, you live in SE - I'm just outside the M25 on the North side myself, which is clearly a 'premium' area, but if I could count on similar (even up to 1500) I would be tempted to consider the basement.. but I'm expecting 2250/sqm optimistically total build cost (but that's including all services, e.g. QS perhaps, arch, surveyors, heating guys etc etc) Did you manage to come in under 2000 total build cost in your neck of the SE-woods? That's what I thought! We intend to remove the existing entirely. I'd need to find out the water sitation, my dad ran into big trouble after a few years with this, it wasn't necessarily a high water level I think, but during heavy rains... I found one document in my rough area saying that the highest this inspection found the water table was 2.0m bgl ('below ground level' I'm guessing) 60K is pretty hefty indeed. Right, so in your case the local guy did it for less?

Can you elaborate on this one? Why so much? Space constrained? I might fire off a separate thread if this becomes interesting but I've been wondering about what the 'optimal' ratios for a plot is.. if you have 500sqm plot in a town, would you want 50% garden, 50% house footprint? How many floors? Is bigger always better for resale value, if you can get away with it with the planning teams? In our house we have heavily prioritized the main spaces (hall, living, kitchen) and sacrificed the size/location of other rooms. Not terrible but eg the average bedroom is say 3.5x4m. This is the surprising one.. normally the rule of thumb I'm aware of is (say) 2000/sqm for 'normal space' and like 3000 for basement.. Why is yours the reverse? In our situation we have a smallish plot where "all things being equal" I'd love to have some rooms in the ground rather than competing for garden space.. I'd even be willing to pay a premium but 50% more is steep... In my context, I would only be tempted to put garage+utility+plant underground, which currently is about 4.5x7m, so 30-odd sqm.. say 45sqm so I have one extra actual room.. How much would a 45m2 basement, mostly under the garage cost? If exactly in proportion with your prices it would be 45/110*120 = 48,000 GBP.. But how much 'mobilisation cost' would you add to that? And given that we've been working with 2250/sqm, because apparently we're being stiffed, maybe *2..

Do you have any idea how much this cost you? I would LOVE a basement (also to shield the noise of the plant room?) but not sure my love stretches to .. well full footprint? Like an entire underground floor? That seems a little overkill-y.. - but at least a garage-sized one still would be probably 50K or so? Would it make the basement cheaper to be under the garage?? I toyed with the idea too.. but even with my planned 2m70 ceiling I can't really "store" the car and still have ample space below I think..

Sadly my main constraint is space. My plot is tiny, and any new room will eat into the garden.. Exactly, I think a garage is probably a good idea I'm not quite sure what this means. I assume you mean that the garage has to be 100m lower than the main dwelling? I guess implement it as if it were a full garage, but fill it with some fake floor if not using it for that purpose? My current idea is to apply for planning permission for a full garage but just mess around with the internals e.g. leave out the main garage door and have a carport. Fair point thx. Are you sure? Current design width is 3.2m.. I guess it depends on the council too? Mostly, yes. Fair point, and indeed, the 'resale value' is quite secondary for me.. of course I don't want to do something that absolutely ruins it but ..

My current car is a Nissan Leaf, exactly the size I made the car in the picture. Cars getting bigger.. mm.. I see two trends 1/ People wanting larger cars for bad reasons ("I am such a crap driver I need a tank so if I hit someone at least me and my little angel will be safe".. surely nobody else will ever think of this upon which this will be tank wars) 2/ Large cars being penalised for carbon footprint reasons. The more weight you need to pull around the more expensive. People needing larger cars for good reasons I figure will stay the same since those reasons (I need space to transport my X) also don't change too much, if anything families are getting smaller and smaller. Basements, even 'unused' ones are really expensive though, no? I have the impression that a 'garage sized' basement is 50,000? To be clear it wouldn't be a garage with the 2m wall depth, but if the wall is movable (perhaps even moved by us..) the new size would be 5.0x3.2m Yes, to scrub the dog/kid/gimp

So.. the UK is weird about garages. But please challenge my claims if you disagree: First of all, for detached houses, not having a garage is a major downside, especially above a certain price (or perhaps size, fanciness level.. all intertwined). But, nobody actually uses garages for storing cars! Now I kind of get it - space is at a premium, cars are more rustproof than previously What I've done is create a garage + utility area that is specifically designed to: 1/ Fit a car outside the garage. 2/ Have a 'fake' garage - looks like one from the outside, but only 2m deep, where we can store smelly bins and bikes, but no (normal) car. 3/ Have a large utility room. But - if one wants an *actual* garage, you can move the internal (2m deep) wall all the way to the back, leaving a teensy but serviceable utility room, and space for a decent car. (5x3.2m). See here: The main compromise is that I have left only 20cm space in front of the garage to the edge of the plot for a normal midsize car (4.5m). Is that too little? 30cm? What do you think ?

Sorry you're right. I assumed that builders could just 'pick the own metric' - but still if you assume they're saying GIA then it can only be better

Sigh. So I guess it's 'up to the builder' to decide how to count? Still, as rules of thumb go, perhaps just stick with gross.