Design Services
The design phase is the most important time spent on the house. It’s a time to think about how you live, ways you might want to change your life, and how the spaces of your home might help you do that. It is not a time to proceed on a fast track just to get the plans finished and to the building department for permits. The design is an exciting time. It’s the ultimate shopping trip, a guided fantasy into the land of make believe, a time to reflect on your past, organize your present, and imagine a future. It’s a time to let your creative juices flow, to be totally self-indulgent, and at the same make a statement of your values. Through the use of materials, the way the house is placed on the site and the way the architectural language of a home is used to draw attention to itself, what is important to you can be expressed in the design of your home.
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Deigning for the site
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Designing for the site
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Designing for the site
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Making the most of small spaces
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Making the most of small spaces
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Making the most of small spaces
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Attention to details
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Attention to detail
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Attention to Details
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My goal as a designer-builder is to design a home for you that corresponds to the ideal image of a home inside you. While listening to your needs and expectations, your dreams and the reality of your financial situation I will attempt to help you visualize an image of your ideal home (verbally, or through pictures or actual sketches), and translate that image into possible designs for your home.
The design process is tailored to the needs and personalities of each individual client. Some clients come with a clear idea of what they want. They have spent a lot of time on their own thinking about what they want in a home. Their ideas, scrapbooks and sketches are used as seeds for the design process. Preliminary discussions are geared toward developing a common language and deepening the ideas they already have. Other people come with a sense of what they want but they don’t know how to express that sense. With these clients, I help them focus on what they want, listen to them and then try to picture for them an image of their home.
A number of different methods are used to help clients undercover that image. Clients talk about where they have lived or places that have impressed them. They make scrapbooks, or look through magazines and books from my library. They might work with "Pattern language" or feng shui or some other vocabulary that could have some meaning for them. They might use values that excite and have meaning for them like energy efficiency or ecological design. These ideas can be used as part of a design language that is developed between us.
For most people with whom I have worked, designing a home has been an exciting time, filled with fantasy and creativity. When someone becomes personally involved in the design of their home they feel a greater connection with their home when it is finished and they are living in it. This is an obvious but important statement. When someone sees their decisions and intentions in each aspect of their home, the connection they feel is obviously more personal than if they moved into a generic house plan designed to appeal to a broad segment of the consumer market. I try to facilitate this feeling of connection by respecting the individual nature of a household’s vision.
Some clients might want a more pragmatic approach to design. They might differ in how much time they want to spend making decisions. With these clients I try to keep our meetings focused on the important aspects of the design and not overwhelm them with details. I respect each person's vision of what they want in a home and how they want it built. A great deal of what happens in the first 3 to 5 meetings is trying to understand what that vision is.
Feel free to email (dmyersdesign@comcast.net) or call ( 503 246 3038) with any questions you might have. An initial site visit is no cost or obligation .