How do you design a house? That's a good question; it's one we asked ourselves any number of times over the past couple of years. 

Traditionally, architects design houses. They consider the people who will live there, what those people want in a house, the local conditions, and factors I can't even think of, and they come up with something that works. A classic example of an architect-designed house is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a house built over a small waterfall in western Pennsylvania.

Today, though, most houses don't seem to be designed by architects any more. Or if they are, the designs aren't aimed to appeal to the individual buyer as much as to a class of buyer. And most houses are also designed to appeal to builders. Consider this: if you have a house that has 3 floor plan variations, each of which has 4 facade sections with 3 options for material, you can build 36 different houses. They all look eerily similar, but they're all different. Vicki and I decided right up front that we didn't want a house like that.

We started the design process by looking at dozens of different floor plans and elevation sketches. Most of them were downloaded from the Internet, but some came from books. We saw several that appealed a great deal more to us than any actual house we'd seen, but none that really cried out. So we went to our builder with some plans, and said "We like this, and this, and this, and we'd like it too look like this from the outside."

Our builder took all of that, gave it to their in house design staff, and came back with a set of plans. We marked them up and went back to the builder. We probably went back and forth like that a dozen times or so over the course of a year, while we were also looking at lots. There was no real hurry, as we were still looking for land, but we wanted to keep the process moving along.

The end result can be found elsewhere on this site. We're very happy with it. It manages to accommodate all of our requirements, without any of the features that we dislike about other houses we've seen. We had to make a lot of compromises along the way, of course, but I think that's a part of the process. Some of those were compromises to reduce costs, like a second fireplace. Some were personal preferences, like carpeting in the great room. I like wood floors, but Vicki wanted carpet. The result is unique, and we think it will be beautiful.