As an architect a lot of people ask me ‘What do I look for in a home’? So, as an architect and a person who has done thousands of building inspections of new and old homes, I thought that I would write a few works on what i look for.
I guess the first things I look for are ‘Form and Function’. To me if something is not functional then it fails in my book. There have been many homes that I have seen that all have rooms that are just not functional and there has been no thought or consideration introduced into the design of how the room will work. Typically these are homes that have been renovated by their owners who are not building designers and have just added what they thought would look good. They usually end up with functional issues and become dead spaces – unused rooms. These rooms are poorly designed by someone who hasn’t taken into account the overall functionality of the space and yes, some are even designed by architects / building designers. We are not perfect, we do make mistakes! These spaces can be deceptive and look fabulous with amazing cosmetics, but if the benchtop is too narrow to use and the cupboards open into each other or the door opens into the toilet pan etc. then they are not functional nor are they practical and therefore they fail.
So many times, have I been inspecting a home and I have thought why have they done that?
Then we have the opposite…
Perfectly functional, but no thought or consideration has gone into the form or aesthetics. Like the time where I saw the stormwater plumbing from a balcony above the front entry come straight out over the front façade, directly above the front door!
Functional yes, but very poor placement of the pipes leading to the ugliest entry façade I have ever seen. The worst is that if the installer had just thought about it, they could easily had positioned / hidden the piping in the adjacent wall which would have been a much better solution. Even better would have been the builder picking this up much earlier!
So, if you’re thinking of building or renovating, a lot of thought and consideration needs to be placed on the form and function of every building element. As Mies Van der Rohe famously said “God is in the detail” he was referring to the way architects think about every little building element and their relationship to each other and how they are detailed, particularly the form and the function of the spaces.
If you are thinking of building or renovating and you would like to have an architect who thinks practically about both the form and the function of the building elements, then call Spire Architects.
“Inspired designs for inspired people”.