Designing a home can be an overwhelming process. The key thing for a home designer to remember is that you are designing a home for you. The best way to start the home design process is to think about your life and needs. What do you do? Consider both day-to-day and special activities. How are these activities related? Which ones naturally fall into groups? Think about how these activities are grouped in your life. This may differ from traditional groupings. How do these activities map onto rooms? Which things must/must not/could share space? We are going to skip the boring details of our activities (brush teeth, feed cats, host friends for games, etc.) and start at the end of this process. At this point we are still very far from a complete design, but we have an idea of the different regions our home will contain.
At the highest level, our home has four regions: public, private, vehicle, and common (i.e., community). These map roughly to the first floor of our home, the second floor of our home, the garage, and the outdoor areas and community house.
Obviously, these areas are not all within the physical bounds defined by our walls. One of the great things about this project is that we get to be involved in the community design process from the beginning. We will not have as much control over the common areas as over our own building, but we will be able to realize advantages that come from sharing amenities.
Over a few posts, we will describe our goals and nascent ideas for each region.