Home Plans and Design

Customize Your Luxury Home Plans

There are many beautiful homes in the United States. Often times, certain areas and certain neighborhoods maintain certain themes. Some areas have houses packed closely together and others have expansive plots of land.

One home I visited was absolutely beautiful. It’s as if the house was specifically designed for the owner. It turns out that the owner had used luxury home plans to create her ultimate domicile. Using these plans, she was able to search from hundreds of prepared plans from the comfort of her personal computer to find just the right design for her needs.

As it turns out, the design is a four bedroom, three and one half bathroom 4,300 square foot Mediterranean house plan. The house is expansive yet comfortable. Three of the bedrooms are on the second floor with a large guest room on the main floor. The master bedroom is huge with a beautiful bathroom. The room has a built in media console that, when closed, is completely hidden from view. One wall is made entirely of windows covered with electric blinds that manage to block out all of the light even on a sunny day. The bathroom has two sinks, separate toilet area, a large whirlpool bathtub and separate shower. Expansive cabinetry along the back wall of the bathroom provides and overwhelming amount of storage for linens and bathroom items.

The rest of the house is just as impressive. The other two bedrooms on the second floor are of equal size. A large bathroom sits between the two. One unique aspect is how the toilet area is separated from the rest of the bathroom by a door. She told me this was a customization she made to the luxury house plans she had purchased. It is quite clever because it allows more than one person to be using the bathroom features at one time. She created a small sitting area by foregoing the tub in favor of a small bench. It is the perfect arrangement for a kid’s or adult’s bathroom.

The most important room in the house – the kitchen – is custom designed for her. The countertops are raised just enough to accommodate her height. The island has its own sink, garbage disposal and cleverly designed hide-away built in food processor. When not in use, it lives beneath the granite surface only to rise up when needed. The same hide-away design is applied to all of the appliances in the room. She told me it was all included in the original plan.

Luxury home plans are the way to go when you want to create a customized living space that fits your specific needs and offers a custom look in whatever neighborhood you choose. HDA, Inc. can modify luxury house plans to fit your special requests for a fee (e.g. that custom bathroom design). Specialized types of luxury homes are available, such as a luxury Mediterranean house plan, from HDA, Inc. HDA, Inc. can provide all of your custom house plans and more.

Modern Home Plans – Having a New Home Designed

Modern home plans are available for those looking to purchase a new home that reflects the latest in architectural house designs. There are many companies that can work with you to help design a modern home based on contemporary styles and layouts. Many firms offer pre designed plans that can be changed to accommodate individual tastes and preferences. There is a huge range of plans available online and from architectural companies – your task is sorting through all the various elements until you can narrow down a list of crucial components to be incorporated into your plan.

A few questions you will need to answer will include: how many bedrooms, whether or not to have a family room, if a separate study room is valuable, and if internal garage access will be important. Plans come in both 2D and 3D versions for you to review before building begins. You will want to go over these with a fine toothed comb, as changes are much easier to make on the blue prints then once actually constructed on the ground.

The building site also needs to be taken into consideration for school districts, noise levels, and neighbours. Different sites will also require different types of permits at different prices. Planning a new home can be challenging as it is a big investment, so the new home should meet all of your specifications. Depending on what stage of life you are at may also indicate the style of design you need to consider. If you are looking at building a family home for example, then storage space for recreational gear such as bikes, boats and tents should be considered, as should backyard space for outdoor activities.

It is wise to speak to your architect about potential roadblocks in the project and about any other extras that are likely to be added to your bottom line figure. You may also want to discuss anything that your architect may think is a better design choice. Given their professional experience in house designing, it can be helpful to hear why certain elements will and will not work as you may envision. Your architect will be able to show you 3D walk through plans too. This can be useful exercise to examine sun patterns at different times of day and get a feel for the scale of your future modern home.

Modern home plans vary greatly, but tend to lean towards a more minimalist feel. Many people feel that contemporary modern homes are more aesthetically pleasing than traditional styles. New house designers today tend to make use of large glass windows for lots of natural light, open floor plans, and living areas that flow into one another. Having a new house designed is certainly an exciting time; ensure you view a wide range of styles and designer plans before you commit to print your future home.

dsigna Concepts is a professional architectural design and draughting services company based in New Plymouth, Taranaki on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. We deliver services from architectural design to council permit drawings. With the use of computer-aided design programs, we not only offer 2D drawings, but also computer generated 3D images. As well as servicing our local market with custom architectural house design services, we also offer a searchable online database of architecturally designed modern home plans, available to anyone in New Zealand.

Universal Home Plan Design Challenges

Ahhhh, Where to start? First, perhaps the fact that very few homes are ever built according to their plan design in its entirety should be highlighted. The biggest change I used to make in plans when I was a truss designer was to convert a ‘stick-built’ roof into a trussed roof. In doing so, many of the bearing points would change. In turn, sometimes the footings needed to be adjusted. Walls may have been added or deleted and in many cases, ceilings were transformed. But without the plans to begin with, there would have been no guide to impose the said design changes.

Switching building materials is a builder/homeowner option. A similar change that builders make is substituting standard lumber for engineered lumber and vice-versa. A change in vendors may mean a change in the size (or spacing) of the framing members since the structural values are not always equal among the manufactured products. Ditto, with standard lumber. While pine is the most common material for general framing, this is not always the case, so assuming that all lumber is equal is an illusion as well. Even the various (and numerous) species of pine vary in strength.

Aesthetic options such as doors, windows, trim, and a homes’ color scheme may vary with an individuals’ tastes. These options will no doubt have an effect on your homes’ final appearance. Once you have gotten past the aesthetics and general structure, you have the building codes to contend with. The IRC code (International Residential Code) alone includes 17 different zones across the Nation. And with each zone, the specifications for construction may vary.

Most of the variances are weather related. Up north, snow is a major factor. On your coastlines, it is the wind that tends to increase the live load requirements and so on. Just as elements fall from the sky and stir in the atmosphere, they vary in the ground below. Are you building on sand, coral, or granite, Etc.? In some instances, a stock foundation plan may need to be re-worked altogether. This is usually the case where pilings are required, or if your home is being built in an area subject to earthquake activity. Both scenarios would require a local engineer to review your drawings, no matter how detailed they are.

The point being is that most stock plans will need adjustment regardless of how fancy they are. I spent 19 years tweaking other peoples’ plans, and have come to the conclusion that a good basic set of plans that can be used as a guide for the builder is a must. When I design my plans, I place my attention on a comfortable traffic pattern to begin with. From there, I trace my bearing points from the top down so that if a beam or a girder is needed, it is shown. True, a beam size may change depending on the location of the job site, but it will be shown anyway. In my days of doing plan take-offs, I found it amazing that so many plans were drawn without any way to hold them up. It is not fair to expect any vendor to design the structure of a home beyond the use of their product/s.

A general ‘guide’ to be sure that all of the trades are on the same page is critical. These days, the building inspectors are getting tougher. They are beginning to want real plans that show how a building is supported. In an effort to try to please everybody, I have found that sometimes it is best to offer simple plans at an affordable price. The individual vendors will provide the engineering specifications for their products, so this is not a requirement that must be met by a home designer. It is important though to map out the skeleton of the home and provide bearing locations for the vendors to work with. Calling the zone location in which a plan is originally designed for, and letting the individual builders make adjustments from there makes more sense than to try to design for the worst case scenarios nation wide.

My next question then becomes, “Why pay for fancy plans when a simple set of accurate plans will serve the purpose?” There will be enough fees along the way without paying an architect to design a home that will probably be ‘tweaked’ anyway. Just a little something to think about when looking at your home plan purchase options.

If you care to review some of the home plans that I’ve designed to date, please stop in for a visit. My designs are all unique with an average family’s lifestyle in mind. Many of my designs are very basic given the state of our economy. More plans will be added as time goes on. For now, I’ve posted what I have already drawn up. Please stop in and sign my guest book, answer my poll, or share your thoughts on my blog. I’d love to hear from you.