Project Home: The Architect Plans

When you look round a ‘project home’ with the estate agent, if your anything like me you are knocking every wall down and mentally orientating your dream layout. I certainly did this when we bought our first home and our lovely architect pretty much followed our steer, with some helpful tweeks.

But THIS house has been a different ball game (here is a link to a digital tour!). We certainly both had plenty of ideas when we looked round, more since we’ve moved in and we keep changing our mind and getting different ideas. Our architect (the lovely Clara from Toute le Monde Design) has been able to be much more creative as this house certainly has many more options. We’ve doubled the sq footage on this move, which has certainly given us more room to play with.

Here are the existing layouts (obviously the scale has gone out the window with editing!)

The main focus has been the ground floor, with the general idea is to rebuild the extension that was put on about twenty years ago, but make it integral to the main house to make a large kitchen looking out onto the garden. The grand idea is to have Critall-style windows with french doors out onto a patio. In our last home we have large bi-folding doors, but for this house, they seem too modern and not quite in keeping.

We are currently talking to Neptune Weybridge to look at Kitchen options, as I love their beautiful and timeless shaker kitchens. I am dreaming of navy units and white quartz surfaces, but more of that  to come.

We also want to make a ‘family entrance’ from the drive through a boot room, where all the coats and wellies can be stored, before moving into the main body of the house. This will be situated in the current garage which will also house the W/C.

If finance allow, we are also looking at building an extension that will be a garage/storage building for bikes, garden furniture etc. and thinking this could be clad in wood to give a 'stable' effect. Upstairs we are keen to move the ‘servants staircase’ up to the loft room to over the main staircase with roof lights to give a grand double height stairway and then use the space where the old stairs were to become an ensuite to the bedroom which we currently refers to as the 'horror room' due to its decor!

The loft room is most certainly going to be a subsequent stage (unless we winch lottery!) but we’ve come up with some ideas of a beautiful master suite. Until I pick the magic numbers, we are going to just do some reconfiguration to allow for the movement of the staircase and put in a new W/C rather than put in a  shower room.

These plans are a work in progress, but after umm-ing and err-ring over a range of different options and usage of the space, this seems to be what we are most happy with and (other than opening up the kitchen, to the horror my Dad - who is also doing all our structural engineering work - as we are taking most of a load bearing wall away!) looking at the most affordable options for the building work.

This has certainly been a really exciting part of the process, picturing what we are going to create in our 'project home' and I can't wait to get started! Although before that an happen we have so many decisions to make and quotes to organise, but thats all part of the fun...