Your Custom Timber Frame Home – How Should it Feel?

A home fulfills many purposes, but it can also satisfy numerous personal, aesthetic, and emotional requirements that can be difficult to describe in words. In starting to imagine your home design, it will help your timber frame architect if you identify and communicate how you want each space to feel. How?

You may find it a challenge to explain how you want a room to feel. Start by doing some simple exercises. (This exercise is the same for timber frame homes, post and beam homes, conventional homes, panel homes, and other building types.)

Pick up a home magazine or imagine a home you are familiar with. Find a room you like. What do you like about it? The way the afternoon sunlight casts shadows within the room? The room’s intimacy or its abundant space?

Think about other spaces you enjoy – the park, the library, your friend’s home. How does the space make you feel? What creates that feeling? Be specific, and write down what you like about it. For instance, you might write, “I like how the color tones of the timbers change as the sun sets” or “I love how the outdoors is brought inside”. These small realizations will help the home design to evolve from a floor plan to a custom home that is an extension of your life philosophy.

Do this for each room in your home design. It is also helpful to describe what you don’t like about certain floor plans, rooms, or space. For instance, if you are not fond of having to walk through your closet to enter your Master Bedroom, document this. Perhaps you like the great room in a magazine photo but you want the timbers to be the center of attention, not the television. Or, you may like the space but find it lacks the intimacy you’re looking for in your home – a cozy corner where you can chat with another couple, a well-lit reading area, or a secluded spot for your cell phone chargers, mail and telephone.

Keep all of your notes together. Cut out full pages or small photos that describe your likes and dislikes. As you go through this process, you can update your thoughts with text and photos. Eventually, you will come to a good understanding of what you want your custom timber frame home to look and feel like. Bring your notebook to your first meeting with your timber frame architect. Starting with your vision in hand will expedite the design process while guaranteeing success.

Your timber frame architect will spend time with you to guide you through this process and will translate your ideas into a preliminary design for your consideration and review. The result will be much more than a home with a standard floor plan – you will have a custom home that matches your philosophy and lifestyle, a reflection of who you are, your dreams and aspirations.

Have you signed up for our FREE Home Seminar?

Photos courtesy of Riverbend Timber Framing.

Jeremy Bonin, AIA NCARB LEED AP

Bonin Architects & Associates, PLLC