The decision to build a house is a big one. So the decision to finalize on the best home design for you also becomes a big one. Although most people would have a good idea of what they want from the house in terms of the different spaces and sizes of spaces, there are a lot of options on plans which satisfy all those basic requirements, and people are often left to choose on the basis of just instinct – which is basically taking an under-informed guess.
Like every decision in our lives, we could improve this decision with a little more information. Most people can’t figure out things like how cost-efficient the plan is or how space efficient the plan is? How much daylight and ventilation will the plan actually have once built? etc, and relies on subjective communication from a host of influencers.
We thought about this in detail and came up with some objective aspects to ascertain the building performance on these fronts. This article is a brief introduction on the same.
Factors to help choose the best home design for you
1. Are you creating more space with less built up area?
A lot of the real benefit of effective space planning comes through spaces which feel larger than they would have been otherwise. In other words, spaces which do more things than they would have otherwise. In essence, you can compare how much is the total area that it really feels like to the actual built-up area.
Home customers should be looking at their total need for spaces not in terms of built up area, but in terms of what it feels like. Built up area can be used to estimate the costs in the meanwhile. In other words, all mismatches in requirements vs budget should ideally be solved only by creating a good amount of such additional space.
If you are building a large house with dedicated areas for every single purpose, this doesn’t matter much.
2. Does your house have too much or too little walls?
More the amount of walls, higher the cost per unit area, for obvious reasons. More the amount of opening areas, higher the cost, but openings potentially provide for light and ventilation as well. If you can keep other things same and reduce these two, you should be doing that to reduce cost.
3. Utility of space
If you are allocating more area to the spaces you spend more time at, better your allocation of areas is. More value you are generating for every rupee spent in terms of spaces available for quality time.
If you are looking at making a compact house, you want to ensure that you have enough space for the right activities, and you might want to ensure you are in a comfortable space for the maximum time period.
4 & 5. Daylight and Ventilation
Both daylight and ventilation make a whole lot of difference in not just the comfort level in the home, but also the general environment and positivity in your house. The more areas that are well naturally lit, the more the comfort factor.
The more areas that have cross ventilation, the more the comfort factor.
Summary and Usage
Carefully considering the above factors can help you the customer objectively analyse various options available in terms of the plan. It will also help you progress in the right direction in thought process and arrive at the best home design for you in a much more decisive and certain manner. There is always some amount of optimization and compromise in terms of these factors. However, you should work with architects to ensure solutions which do not fall below your thresholds on any of them.
Have you considered all this while finalizing your home plan? Share your thoughts below.