Appearances Make Impressions, Its Personality that makes an Impact. The Design Stage

There is alot that goes into Designing a Room, A garden or a whole House. The sun, light and personality seem ( aswell as budget) to be an important factor.

We could never understand as a whole the work that goes into design and architecture it seems very complex

Who ever is designing your house has the hard job of understanding you, your individual personalities, and both of you as a partnership in order to get the design right.

We had to think about How we want to use the house, how we want it to look, did we have thoughts on changing rooms around or leaving the footprint as it was. Of course we all have different tastes, styles wants and needs.

So before Isabel did the design for Foxglove Lodge, both me and Rob had to sit down and think about what we wanted individually. Which actually is a difficult thing to do when everything you talk about is as a couple, and how you want things as a couple.

So to sit and write or find pictures of what you as an individual person would like the house to be used is very hard. It does seem strange writing that as we both consider ourselves independent as well as a twosome. The pictures on this post are ones I chose at the time, I think now we would have a more clear vision.

So rooms like the living room and kitchen we were on the same page really, we want a relaxing casual living kitchen and dining area not formal at all and open plan one big social area really with a bit of a nod to the farmhouse style and no modern or trendy styles.

We both agreed light was important, Foxglove lodge was very dark inside with black internal window frames so we wanted alot of light but also privacy.

We then had to think about our hobbies.

Rob is very practical and loves making and fixing things so an area for him for that is his own space.

I play the flute, so a music room where I wont disturb the household, maybe a relaxing reading area.

We both like fitness machines so an area to house those.

I think I mentioned in a previous post I make wood gifts out of the wood from our garden, so a hobby space for me. Once we were thinking about hobbies it flowed, but life isn`t all hobbies, and soon we were running out of space for anymore hobby rooms, so we had to think about how we wanted to live.

We had to include our dog Bodhi in this design stage. Small Dog Big Mud, so did we want a sink outside for the muddy hose down, also did we want our utility room to be made the very Muddy Dog entrance. Did we still want to keep the chimneys and have open fires.

How did we want the bedrooms, how many bathrooms, how many bedrooms in the annexe.

There was so much and so much detail at this early stage that we hadn`t really thought about. ( at this point I was dreading having to think where the plug sockets should go)

The one thing that was very clear to us was that we knew we wanted to reduce the amount of rooms, to make a 3 bedroom house with an annexe. As we bought Foxglove lodge it was sold to us as an 11 bedroom house, Sounds grand but it wasn`t and alot of the rooms were not workable as bedrooms, We also had to think about planning too. We have a septic tank for the house. We are new to the septic tank system and were mindful of the ratio of people in the house to the tank. ( we actually don`t know that many people that would stay all at once, so 11 bedrooms was too many for us)

The big thing also was keeping as much of the cottage as possible trying not to destroy it and its history this was and is important to us.

So, now we have our personalities and how we see the house being used written down on paper we now have to wait for the design.

'The Door Handle Is The Handshake of The Building ' Juhani Pallasmaa