Bringing the Luxury of Old World Spain to Your Home Design

Bringing the Luxury of Old World Spain to Your Home Design

Spanish design is about highlighting great architectural elements. Unusual for California, Texas and Southwestern, Spanish-style houses are usually made of stucco with heavy wood trim and red clay tile roofs, have large terraces and open windows and support arches over a square design. The front door is often more than a porch into a small yard, as opposed to opening right into the house.

An important element of Spanish home design is the seamless integration between inner and outer space. Floor plans are usually open to a large outdoor area with French doors and arches designed to allow abundant natural light. These outdoor spaces are meant to be inhabited as an extension of the house. Many designs will be centered on the main page, which was originally intended to offer the Spanish aristocracy a private garden protected from public view. This protected and intimate space is perfect for relaxing and entertaining on warm summer nights.

Distressed wood is very important for the Spanish style. The most traditional flooring choices in Spanish-style houses are hardwood and full carpeted rooms are rarely found. Terracotta tiles are another popular choice of flooring material, especially if it has a rather rough texture or a pressed surface. Sometimes bright tile accents in the corners or the center of the engraved tile are added for more drama and color. Adding hand-painted tiles to the kitchen table or backsplash is another great way to combine Spanish colors and designs.

Interior walls are generally finished with stucco textures in warm earth colors such as taupe, burning orange, brown chocolate, and mustard greens. Warm poppy red, cobalt blue, olive green and golden yellow are popular accent colors that bring a Mediterranean feel to your home. Design elements such as earthenware vases, jars, and bowls in unique shapes can make … Read the rest

How to Determine the Most Efficient Design for Your Home

How to Determine the Most Efficient Design for Your Home

Design efficiency is often overlooked and not often discussed by buyers and builders. Over the years of home design and building I have had to review countless home designs to save on buildings to achieve budget targets. There are a few simple rules when undergoing this review which I have described below.

Saving wasted space

This is the simplest step for someone with a high level of spatial awareness. A brief overview of a floor plan will highlight areas larger than needed or excessive. Examples might be significant hall lengths, odd sized areas where rooms are not well connected or flowing or only large rooms. Last year a client came to me and showed me a house plan that he had designed through an architect named who has a master bedroom of 8.5 mx 3.0 m and the client did not identify the room as strange until I showed it. If you are accustomed to seeing architectural plans, the process is quite simple, but for most home buyers, it is very difficult to visualize the space just by looking at a scale image. A simpler way that I recommend to buyers is to take a blank piece of paper and cut the scale-sized furniture they have in their current home, then position it on the home design plan where they think it will go. This will then help them assess the proportion of room size in relation to their furniture.

Remove the excess cost of the technique

When designing and building two storey houses, the main factor in price efficiency is the cost of engineering. A large open space on the ground floor can cause engineers to increase the depth of suspended plates from 172mm to 257mm, which adds significant costs. Keeping enough structural walls under the slab in key … Read the rest