Questions to Ask an Architect Before Designing Your Home

Your home is really an extension of your personality – in the way you live, in your values, and in your lifestyle – so when you’re building a new home, it’s important to get the design right. This video by Better Homes and Gardens presents the top five questions you should ask an architect before you begin designing your home:

1. What’s your role on a project? Everybody has an idea of what the home should be – the rooms, the style, the feel of them, fitting into the fabric of the neighborhood. Your architect should take all of those things and package them and design a home around it.

2. How do you design a home for a modern family? You want to get all of the functionality that modern families are looking for, but everything should relate to each other really well in terms of the design and the finish. A kitchen design where kids can be doing homework on the island while mom or dad prepare a meal allows face-to-face communication whenver you want it. And certainly for entertaining, you want to be able to have quite a few folks in the great room.

3. What rooms are important but get overlooked? A lot of time and attention go into the great room, the kitchen and the bathrooms, but no one thinks about support spaces like the mud hall or laundry room. How do you come home at the end of the day? Where do things like groceries, soccer bags, briefcases, and backpacks?

4. When is innovation included in the design process? Your architect should start with the design and make sure it includes the spaces you want. Then consider technology and how it can make things a little bit easier or organize things a little bit differently. And that’s where innovation comes into play.

5. When building a home, what are the top three things to consider?

• The site – the location – determines the direction that you go in terms of the fabric of the neighborhood where you’re building.
• Consider your family needs and sizes of spaces. Will this be your forever home? Are you building a home to age in place and see your grandchildren come back to?
• When building a home, reflect on your past homes or other special homes that you’ve been in and some of the experiences you’ve had in homes and use those recollections to help you think about how you define home.