About designing your own Modern Dream Home

We should take some time to talk about the design of the house. As an architect, trying to design your own home as compared to one for a client always has its extra stress. You inevitably want to try exploring some different ideas and materials and of course you want it to be a bit of a show piece for future clients. And while you want to make sure you take time to explore these different ideas you also want to make sure that like any other project, you keep it rolling along. Inevitably in the end, designing your own home always takes a bit more time.

Our first big design discussions related to location of private versus public spaces (private being the bedroom area, and public being the dining room, living room and kitchen). The house would be a one story with a walkout basement which meant that you would enter the house on the upper floor but would have access to the yard from the lower floor. We wanted to have a close connection to the yard from the public spaces so naturally those went to the lower floor while the bedrooms were located in the upper or main floor.

I have posted the plans to the side of the BLOG so that you can see the layout.

Construction Has Started! Let the new home rise from the ground….

Having been around concrete all my life I am naturally interested in exploring using it any way that I can and with any chance I have. My wife is less excited with this prospect but keeps an open mind. At one point in the design of the house we had talked about incorporating rammed earth as a material that would be expressed as a theme for the interior and exterior of the house. When it got down to it though, it was too expensive and too complicated to use. And so the idea of using exposed concrete became the natural second option.

The one main wall where this is to occur is the end wall of the living room (on the North side). It’s probably the most focal point of the house and will be seen by anyone who comes to visit. The pressure was on. I wanted to capture the same sort of feel as a rammed earth wall which tends to look striated from the various levels of earth that are compacted in layer after layer to make up the height of the wall. So I decided to go to an older method of forming the wall known as board form.

Rather than building the wall forms out of large sheets of smooth plywood, you form using long planks of wood that are rough sawn. I also decided to play with the colour of the concrete and add an admixture. For all you concrete geeks out there the concrete mix was as follows:

30 mpa with 3/8” aggregate and ½ of 1% Glenium 3030NS.

For the colour admixture we used 1 bag BL-3212R Silver Diamond from Interstar for every cubic meter.

So this Friday with big snowflakes falling out of the sky the concrete arrived.