Designing Your Home from the Ground Up

With a new year upon us and spring on the way, now is the perfect time to begin designing a new home, renovate or add onto your existing home. In addition to our interior design services, Lewis Robinson, who returned back in September, can help clients from the ground up. Lewis has a master’s degree in architecture and a career full of fabulous homes here in North Alabama, Louisiana, and has even renovated houses in Beverly Hills and the New York Hamptons. With his education and professional experience in modern architecture, local historical and neoclassical styles, he can come up with original ideas that fit any style of home.

In any new home, there are 4 phases of the process, and here is how we at Accents of the South would go about designing your home.

1. Preliminary Design

Designing a new home is a process that allows you the homeowner to fully give your input during the design phase. Our initial meeting will give us an idea of your needs. This includes how many and what types of rooms you want, square footage, budget, and most importantly gives insight into your personal style. Often the owner even wants advice when purchasing a lot to ensure it’s just the right place for the type of home they want.

The next step is to meet with you at the site. A custom designed home should respond to its location, take advantage of important views, trees, rises and dips in the land to give your home a truly custom design, and even look at the context and take design clues from neighboring homes and buildings, which is particularly important in historic districts.

Out comes the trace paper and pens, and Lewis starts sketching. The process begins very loosely with “bubble diagrams” that simply show arrangements of spaces rather than shapes of rooms. These diagrams then develop into floor plans, and the house begins to take shape with character and flow defined. As the design develops the exterior walls of the house, known as elevations, are developed simultaneously with these initial plans. It’s critical that they work both inside and outside.

2. Design Development

Now it’s time to concentrate on little details. The core spaces of the house are studied and presented, so that we can tailor the look to you. Windows and doors take shape, and the exterior look is finalized.

3. Construction Documents

With the design finalized, this phase is the most important to your contractor. The construction documents let the contractor know exact room dimensions as well as provide them with charts known as schedules for all of your doors and windows, flooring, wall and ceiling surfaces. The structural engineer will size all the beams and framing, and provide structural details that go into deep detail making sure your house is strong from the foundation up. During this time we will design cabinetry for your kitchens and baths, along with baseboards, door and window casings, and crown moldings.

4. Construction Administration

Lewis, our construction administrator, our structural engineer and the contractor all work as a team to ensure the HVAC and electrical are installed in the correct locations before the first sheetrock even goes up. Our structural engineer will also provide inspections on the foundation, and we will continue to work together with the contractor until the day you move in. At the end, a “punch list” of items your contractor has either missed or needs to finish will be completed before the final payment is made.

Here at Accents of the South, we will make the construction process easy for you.  Our experience, skill and staff will help you make your dream a reality.  At Accents of the South we can design from the ground up, including selecting the perfect furnishings and finishes to finish the home.