How An Architectural Designer Mindfully Prepares For Seamless Residential Design
Our Design Process
Our main priority is getting to know our client. Our client is the most important part of any design project. For residential projects, the homeowner is the provider and the end user. It’s important for us to know our client’s needs, their preferences including likes and dislikes, all while staying within their budget.
We ask key questions to understand how we can best serve you and solve your design woes. As your designer, we’ll help improve and simplify your decision making process by working closely with you to determine how you want to utilize your space.
Our core mission is to listen and provide feedback when necessary, and to provide honesty on design choices that may affect your bottom line. In this short overview, I will explain the items we discuss during our pre-design phase so you will feel more confident when hiring an architectural designer.
The Wish List: Getting To Know Yourself First
The wish list brings excitement to the idea of renovating. If you haven’t already begun writing your wish list, this will be your first step as a client. “What do I want?” can spark hundreds of imaginative ideas. Write down everything that comes to mind to get your creative juices going. Start with the big items, such as an addition, new garage or kitchen remodel, and work your way from there.
To avoid going overboard on your renovation budget, it’s critical to rank and prioritize each item. Identifying your priorities at the beginning of a project will allow for more clear and focused decision making in the design process. To start, think about the area of your house that poses the most challenges for you and/or the people you live with.
Is there always a lineup for the bathroom in the morning? Is the kitchen space too crowded? Where do you hang your coat when you walk into the house?
Go back through your list and grade each item using this scale:
Critical
Important but not critical
Nice to have
You can even take it a step further and develop a wish list per room. We’ve created a free workbook that you can use to create your wish list. A downloadable link is at the bottom of this webpage.
Defining Your Goals Together
This is the most important question in the design process. Identifying the biggest pain points you have with your current home will determine the objectives for the project. Using your wish list as a guide, these objectives can be based on aesthetics, function, performance, or financially related.
Establishing your most important objectives will determine these goals. To be successful in providing a design that meets these expectations, the entire design team must understand the intent, including our client. Usually, these goals are measurable through the number of bedrooms, roughly the size of each room, and how our client plans to furnish each room.
Some goals are subjective as everyone has their own definition of beauty. Subjective goals may include the desired architectural style or specific design elements like coffered ceilings or Sho Sugi Bahn siding. Providing a visual can aid in communicating the subjective goals (we will revisit this later in the article).
First, we’ll schedule a virtual design kick-off meeting to go over goal planning together. Afterwards, we’ll create a programming document to capture all of the goals we discussed and define the values for the project - we call this generative logic.
“The generative logic is the “vision” or the “concept” that guides and directs the design process”
This is a set of values created from the project goals and the priority ranking of those goals to contemplate the concept designs during the Schematic Design phase. We evaluate each concept design using these values before presenting them to you. It also helps us come up with alternative solutions when design problems or budget setbacks occur. It is the driving force for productive renditions, evaluations, and the selection of the preferred design concept. You can read more about the Schematic Design phase here.
21 Questions & Then Some
An architectural or interior design firm will have a list of questions prepared during pre-design. At Blüne Inc, we call this the Lifestyle Questionnaire. The questionnaire dives deep into your current lifestyle, hobbies, and various aesthetic questions. We give this to you as homework to inspire thought that may not have come to your mind before.
We ask you to think about the future, and what your plan is in the next 5, 10, or even 20 years. This makes a big impact in the design phase because a forever home varies very differently from a “home for now”. As your designer, we’ll guide you through making decisions that may affect your home’s resale value. We can also identify areas that don’t require renovation if you do plan to move in the next few years.
Some examples of these questionnaires are:
What do you like/dislike about your home?
How often do you entertain?
How many people will occupy the space at any give time?
What colours are you most drawn to?
What places have you travelled that resonated with you?
We will review the answers to these questions and create the list of goals and priorities mentioned in the previous section.
Knowing Your Budget
A project’s cost has a significant impact on the design process. With construction costs at an all time high, it may be challenging to get everything you need AND want in your project.
To prevent revisions to the design after completing the design process (in the industry we call this “Value Engineering”), it’s imperative to know exactly what you can afford.
Our approach is to balance the cost of design to create value at each design phase, as the construction costs are not often fully understood at the beginning of a project and are refined through the process.
Many contractors won’t provide a construction quote until drawings are presented. We will touch base with contractors on a similar project and use this as a benchmark for total project cost. When it comes to materials, your designer will have quotes prepared by manufacturers in the design development stage to allow an opportunity to make potential changes to the design without revisions after a permit is issued.
Visual Communication
Asking the right questions is a large component of getting to know you. Also providing a visual representation, like a moodboard, of what’s inspiring your design process is also very valuable to us. Sharing a collection of photos will help communicate to your designer the architectural style you like, colours, tones, and materials that can’t always be translated through words.
Pinterest is a great resource for you to gather inspiration photos for your home and it’s free and simple to sign up. You can easily stay organized with the creation of personal Pinterest boards, which can be created per each room you’re seeking inspiration for. You can also use Pinterest’s browser add-on to save photos from any webpage to your board. Houzz is another great resource for inspiration which you can refine to the city you live in.
The feel of a space through form and texture can’t easily be portrayed in text, on a computer screen, or in a two-dimensional plane. The designer will provide material samples and 3D design services to help you make sound design decisions every step of the way.
Conclusion
The beginning of your project sets the tone for the rest of the design. Bringing a wish list of items invites us to have an open conversation about the design intent. Through our interview process, we will refine those goals and create a solid base to refer to during the Schematic and Design Development phases.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to your bottom line. Once you set a budget, we will make sure you stick to it. We will check-in with you at the end of each phase so that there are no unexpected surprises when construction begins. Using tools like Pinterest and Houzz to create an inspiration catalogue will increase the understanding for us designer’s trying to pick your brain. I encourage you to create your Pinterest account and start ‘Pinning’.
I hope you’ve learned more about our pre-design process at the beginning of a project. Clear goals lead to a successful design project and keeps everyone on track (and the project tends to move quicker too). To learn more about our other phases of design, check out our other articles in the Blüne Dossier. If you’re ready to work with us, get started by filling out our project intake form.