Sometimes one can enter a house and everything just looks and feels right, while sometimes one can enter a house, and even although everything looks acceptable, with quality materials and expensive appliances, something just doesn't feel right. What is it that stimulates these feelings and perceptions that differentiate between a home and just another house? The unquantifiable aspects of good architectural design sometimes caus a house to feel right rather than to look nice.

Planning the spaces and the flow between them

An ordinary "cookie cutter" house may have the same number, type and size of rooms as a home produced by quality architectural design, but the rooms may simply be fitted together without a proper sequential flow. They are simply squares for each required room with little or no logical connection between them. Rather think of a proper planned home as a series of spaces, each answering the needs experienced by the owners for their new house to fulfil. These spaces are three-dimensional in nature, fitted together so as to provide sequential progression as you move through the house. The walls are merely the connections between the spaces while each three-dimensional space is underpinned by a floor and topped by a ceiling. These walls, floors and ceilings may have varying dimensions, built from various materials and finished with various textures. So the bottom line is, you shouldn't design a house, you should design spaces to be enclosed by the house, with a lot of attention to the flow through the house.

The flow through the house is literally about how you experience the spaces and the sequence through the spaces when you walk through the house. But it is more than that, it is also about how you experience the house with your senses, your mind. Entries, hallways and corridors are spaces where you travel through, while rooms are spaces where you linger and pause.

A major principle of flow is the axis, the most widely used concept in organising the flow through the house. An axis is an imaginary line that divides rooms in a house in an orderly manner. There may for instance be a primary or central axis, a lateral or cross axis or even a bent axis through the house. Axis is a major tool to make a house feel right, to give a sense of balance when you enter and move through the house. Don't confuse a central axis with symmetry. Although symmetry has its place in architecture, especially when designing a formal or grandiose house, the appeal of modern and contemporary architecture usually lies in asymmetry.

So what are your needs inside and outside the house?

Even before you can start planning the spaces and the links between them, you simply must jot down list of all the characteristics of your future house - single or double storey, how many bedrooms, bedrooms on ground floor or first floor (or both), how many bathrooms (en suite or not), how many living rooms, open or semi-open plan, open or enclosed verandah (also referred to as a stoep in South Africa), separate dining room, study or home office, how many garages, staff accommodation, how much storage etc. How do you want these rooms (spaces, remember!) to interact with each other? Consider how you will use each space, what the dimensions of each space should be. Remember, the bigger the spaces, the higher the construction costs will be. On the other hand, too small spaces can be too cramped to be used for the purpose it has been designed for. The secret is to keep all spaces to a human scale, neither too big, nor too small, not too high, not too low. I can't stress enough that you are planning your own house, so don't think in terms of what should be included to please other people, or worse, to impress other people. Only think about what you want, and how it must work for you and your family. One caveat though, don't go too unconventional or bohemian or self centred, unless you really plan not to ever sell the house to anyone else in the future. Alway keep a balance between your very own needs and a degree of conformity to good architectural design principles.

At this stage, you should not be too concerned about any other detail regarding the spaces you need in your new home, this will come as a future step in your design process.

Once you have a list of all the spaces you need and have given some attention to the flow between these spaces, it is time to put some walls, ceilings and floors around these spaces. In doing so, you should start thinking about the characteristics of each room you are about to create. List these characteristics with the list of the spaces you need, keep working on it so that you can develop a list of all your needs regarding your new home. Because all the rooms in your home will be three dimensional spaces that must fit in next to each other and even on top of each other, you must at this stage start to give some thought about the horizontal as well as the vertical links between the spaces, in the case of a double storey house. This will start to affect the roof design of the house, and start to impact on the elevations and general aesthetics of the house. However, I don't believe this is the time to be too concerned about the building style of the house. Once you have progressed well with the placing and linkage of the spaces making up the house, you can start thinking whether the facades and roof design of the house should represent a specific architectural building style. See post my post Excuse me, what style is this? on popular architectural styles in South Africa.

Stitching it all together...

So how do you transfer your list of needs (all the spaces and interaction between them) into a real design? I suggest the old fashioned way: Start off with a pencil and a piece of paper - yes pencil and paper (with an eraser at hand) and not some fancy expensive computer software. Leave that for later when you have completed stitching your needs together on paper. The computer software is perfect to refine your initial sketches and to generate nice 3-D images. Start off by drawing circles on the paper, a circle for each space on your needs list, with the size of the circle roughly corresponding with the desired size of the particular space. This is called a bubble diagram. This is the time to place the circles (or bubbles) next to each other, roughly corresponding to your needs list you have drawn up earlier. Now is the time to remember all the planning that you have considered earlier: Where is north? Which rooms must face north, which side is the street and entrance to the erf? So where must the front door be? Where must the garage and the garage doors be? Do you want acces from the garage to the house? Into which room - the foyer, the kitchen or laundry? Where will al the public spaces be like the entrance, foyer, lounge, dining room, office? Where will all the private spaces be like the bedrooms and bathrooms? Will the kitchen be the hub of the house or tucked away somewhere in the private part of the house?

These and many more questions must be addressed now. It is extremely easy to move circles around on a bubble diagram, more involved to change layouts once a building plan has been drawn, and almost impossible or very costly to move brick walls around once they have been built. Playing with the bubble diagram is the fun part of the design process. Remember, no detail at this stage, just some circles on paper with arrows in-between them to indicate the required linkages between the future spaces.

No house is an island...

In my blog First things first – site specifics, I have discussed in detail the importance of designing a new house in such a way that it responds favourably to the property upon which it is to be constructed, both in terms of natural and statutory challenges and opportunities. This means that your hypothetical bubble diagram must also work out on the actual site. It is of no use if your refined bubble diagram doesn't fit on your erf (remember it must fit in-between the building lines, not the erf boundaries), or your planned house exceeds the maximum coverage allowed for in the town planning scheme, or even worse, you have forgotten about the pesky municipal sewer line in the (registered) servitude over your erf.

Developing your bubble diagram into a proper design really takes some time and skill. Once you have a feeling for the location and relative placement of each space in your house, and you have thought through how these spaces will link to each other, it is time to start adding walls to your bubbles. Enclose each circle with lines representing the thickness of the walls, place openings and/or doors to link the spaces with each other, and add corridors where needed. Remember, there are more ways to accomplish a linkage between two spaces than linking them by means of a corridor, they may also be linked via another space, or in the case of an open plan design, no link at all. This may be more of an iterative process, because now is also the time to start placing the windows and other focal points in each space. This is also the time that the roof design of the house will become more prominent, as well as the building style of the future building.

As a side note to this post, most of these planning and design principles may be used in designing your outdoor spaces too. Courtyards, patios, verandahs and the like or also just spaces, rooms on the outside of your house, with or without walls, roofs and floors.

I hope that this post has wetted your appetite to become deeply involved in the design of your own home. Remember that architects are trained and skilled to do just that, to design your house according to your needs. The purpose of this post is to inform you about some of the processes your architect will go through, and also to enable you to speak to your architect in a language that he/she will understand. Of course, if you are competent and skilled enough, nothing stops you from designing your own house, keeping in mind the principles set out in this post. See this post as a very handy building block in the process to design your own future home!

Source: Portions of this post have been based on William J Hirsch, Designing your perfect house.