How to design a home: The four “F”s of great home design - Episode 1 (Season 2)

Hello! Welcome to Season 2, How to Design a Home. This is Episode 1. I'll be sharing the four Fs you need to know to design a family home that works now and always. Welcome to Get It Right with the Undercover Architect. This is the podcast all about designing, building or renovating your home. I'm your host Emilia Lee. Think of me as your secret ally. I'm on a mission to help you create a home that makes your life better, whoever you're working with and whatever your dreams, your location or your budget. Together we'll uncover the nitty-gritty of how to get it right and how to create a home that works, feels great and that you feel great in. So join me now. In the very very first episode of The Get It Right podcast, I shared that I'll be breaking this podcast into seasons. I see it as an opportunity to deal with some big and chunky but really helpful subjects because we can then break them down into bite-size episodes that are much easier for you to listen to and to digest. And given this is the first year of The Podcast, I'm super keen to take you on a journey and sharing with you what I believe is the best way to design, renovate or build your home and to get it right. The podcast is also about answering the most common questions that I receive. The ones that I get so many emails about, the ones that you're searching to answer and the ones that keep you up at night when you're planning your future home. Many of these questions revolve around the design process, designing a home, how to do it well and how to get it right. How to design something that suits your lifestyle now and will still suit it in five, 10 or 15 years time or even more. Whether you're renovating or your building, this I know for sure. Getting it right in your design is where your home lives or doesn't. Look, people worry about regretting their tile choice and they worry about getting it wrong in their paint selection. They worry about not affording the light fittings or the sofa that they really want and they worry about the project taking six months longer than they planned it to. But if you stuff up the layout, the arrangement, the size, the shape, the actual design of your home, I just know it will bring far greater regret than anything else. So what does it mean for your home to be well designed? I think the words design and well designed and great design, they're just so loaded. I mean, look, it can be everything from super expensive to super elite, to highly detailed, to extremely beautiful right through to how something works. And for me, and this is how I always refer to design at undercover architect, design is about what it achieves. Great design makes your life better, pure and simple, more fun, more convenient, more beautiful. Sometimes the best design is so great because it just gets out of your way. It's so good you don't even notice it. So when I talk about this in relation to your home, I see that a world design time is a home that works and works well. So it's functional, it feels great. It makes your life more convenient, simpler, more beautiful and more fun. So you feel great in your home too. Now let's get down to the fundamentals. I'm going to use this episode to introduce the four F's that I like to consider when designing any room in your home and in designing your home overall. I'll be talking about these four F's as we move through this season. So you'll hear a lot more about them. I want to turn you into a design detective, okay? So that you can look at how you'll bring these four F's to your home design to get it right. So what are these four F's? Well, they are functionality, flexibility, furnishability and flow. So let's go through these one by one. And I'll share some tips with you to get you started. And as I said, we'll go through these in more detail as the season progresses. Now F, number one, functionality. If you haven't heard of Lucca Busier, he was a Swiss French architect who is really considered one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. And he wrote this in his 1927 manifesto, which was called towards an architecture. A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot water, cold water, warmth that will, conservation of food, hygiene and beauty in the sense of good proportion. In Lucca Busier's world, this meant that the home was undecorated, unadorned and really efficient. It provided for the necessities of life only. There were no fluffy cushions to make that sofa extra comfy in Lucca Busier's world. Look, this was a completely different way of considering homes at the time. It was really contentious. And it came at a time when the norm for housing was at Wardian and Queen Anne's style. In Australia, we were in the throes of our post-feteration era. So you think California bungalows, Queenslanders and old English style homes. All very decorative, all very traditional. And here came Lucca Busier with this controversial manifesto and equally controversial architecture to back it up. At the time, it seriously flipped the world of residential architecture on its head. A house is a machine for living in is certainly an interesting way to think about our homes. But when I think about the importance and functionality in homes, it's really not this hardcore. I do believe that homes perform a very important role in our everyday lives. They keep us sheltered, secure, warm or cool, safe and protected from the elements. They enable us to go about the necessary everyday activities, be it cooking, cleaning, washing, sleeping, all in relative comfort and privacy. However, I believe that our homes can also assist in shaping our mindsets in restoring our sense of self, in framing our identities and in connecting us with our environment. And in giving us a platform and a place to feel truly ourselves. Our homes are the stage for so many memories and events in our lives from the really big deal ones like bringing your newborn home from hospital for the first time through the ones that seem minor and incidental, but they can be just as pivotal. Homes get a lot asked of them and so they need to perform many, many roles. And so these are the two main questions that I ask when I'm thinking about functionality in our homes. Question number one is what role is your home performing? And question two is how can you design it to perform that role better? Look, this can be in shaping the actual rooms and spaces to help you get your everyday jobs done better. It can be looking at what you provide in those rooms and spaces and how your rooms and spaces perform different roles at different times of the day and year. It's also in looking at what type of natural light they'll need and where in your home they should be located as a result and that's where we think about orientation. So what role do you want your home to perform? There's a quote floating around on the internet and I'm not sure who said it first, but for me it sums things up perfectly when we talk about this idea of role. Our homes should inspire us to go out into the world to do great things and then welcome us back for refreshment. I honestly believe that our homes can help us be the best version of ourselves and honestly I get so excited at the thought of everyone creating a home that helps them go out into the world each day as the best version of themselves. Can you imagine how our world would change then? So how can you design your home so it helps you do your everyday jobs better? Your life better, more simply, more conveniently. We're going to be drilling down into the detail of this as we go through each room and space in your home. But think holistically at this stage. What do you expect of your whole home? How do you hope it will help you live? What role do you want your home to perform in your everyday life and in helping you grow and create the lives of your family overall? Now if number two is flexibility. Did you know that the average house is owned for seven and a half years and many of my clients when they're thinking about renovating or building their homes, they're usually thinking of a 10 to 15 year time frame. If you have little people in your family, you'll know that you'll see a huge amount of change over that time frame of 10 to 15 years. And really this is the case for most of us at any time in our lives. 10 to 15 years, it can go by in the blink of an eye, but it can also see big changes in the way that we live and the number and the size of the people in our homes. So how do you design your home so it suits you now and always? The elements that we physically construct our homes from just seem so permanent and they seem so messy and potentially expensive to undo and change. So it can be tricky when your kids is say one and three years old to think about designing your home for now so that it will also suit you when they're say 16 and 18 years old. We also want flexibility on a day-to-day basis. How can we make our homes comfortable for one or two people and then also handle those big gatherings of family and friends? What can we do to make our homes feel awesome on weekends and on weekdays and during daylight hours and into the evening? There are ways to make our homes flexible and versatile, to respond to and support us in the changes of our everyday life over the years that we live in our home. It requires certain attitudes and strategies in how we create the rooms and the spaces within it. It also requires you knowing how to predict what you'll need and this is the bit that I see most homeowners struggle with. Look, don't worry. I'm going to be taking you through ideas on flexibility on a room-by-room basis in this season of the podcast. Now F number three is furnishability. In undercover architect, I get to see loads of floor plans in working with so many homeowners and in my research. I get to see the good, the bad and the very, very ugly. It's worth noting that the home designs that don't work, that don't get it right, they all have one main thing in common and look, this is a fantastic simple lesson for you if you want to avoid stuffing up your design. What is this one thing? They don't have furniture drawn on the floor plans. It sounds far too simple, doesn't it? Yet I'm not kidding. It's the one red flag I see for any floor plan design that's not working. This is the thing about our homes. We place furniture in our homes to improve their functionality and their comfort. Yet so often homes are designed without consideration of how we'll furnish them once we move in. Now when we design our homes, it's important that the spaces work for the furniture that will be going in them, that way we don't get any nasty surprises, planning how your furniture will be arranged and what type you'll have. That can all happen at the home design stage whilst your house is still lines on a page and it's pivotal for getting the design right. Over the coming episodes, I'm going to be sharing some tips about the layout of furniture in your home, how to make rooms and spaces feel a certain way with the way that you lay out furniture in them. So your tip for now, whether you're designing yourself or you're working with a professional, just ensure that furniture is drawn on your floor plans, to scale the way that you want and see it being laid out. This is seriously the fastest and the simplest way to test that things will work out, how you need them to in your finished home. Now another thing that I just want to mention as part of furnishability is ergonomics. So what is ergonomics? Well ergonomics looks at how we as humans interact with the objects and the spaces around us. The study and science of ergonomics then enables us to actually make that interaction happen more efficiently and more comfortably. So in your home, this can mean understanding the space that we as humans actually physically take up and how we do things like sit and reach and walk and lie, the list goes on. But when I'm talking about specific rooms, I'll be encouraging you to think about how you physically occupy them because when you consider this, it gives you better information to design a suitable environment. For example, should your hallways and stairs be wide enough for you to walk down them whilst holding the hand of a small child or whilst holding bags of groceries? Because that will determine a certain width on that hallway. Should your laundry door be wide enough so that you don't have to turn sideways to get out of it whilst you're holding your washing basket full of wet washing? Thinking about all these little details as you go through designing your home and the rooms in it, they can make the biggest difference in how easy your home is to use and to be in. Now if number four is flow. Look, this word flow gets used a lot when it comes to home design and it's a fave on the TV programs and in real estate speak. This home has great flow. What it essentially means is that rooms are well connected and they're arranged in a way that helps them to work better both as rooms and as a home overall and it can also refer to how they connect to and access outside. Now when you're designing a home flow comes from a few things. It comes from understanding how you want each room to function, how each room will be furnished and how you want to move and interact from space to space. And it involves asking questions such as what rooms do you want near each other? What rooms do you want away from each other? What do you want to see from each space and not see and hear and not hear? And what does this mean for the costs and the construction of your home? What are the impacts of certain decisions about room, arrangement and planning? Not getting flow right can make a home really inconvenient to live in. It can be the difference between your home really relaxing you and it frustrating you completely because the simplicity in moving about our homes in a logical and useful way. This is really key to a home feeling great and you feeling great in it. Now I'll be diving more into this as we go through each room of your home. So stay tuned for this coming season to get great insights into how to get flow into your home. Now there is a fifth F, this surprise fifth F and this one is what we start with at the beginning and it's also it comes at the end when we get it right in the other four F's. So this fifth F is feel. In one of the early episodes of the Get It Right podcast I spoke about how important it is actually to think about feel. How do you want your home to feel and how do you want to feel in your home? Using feel and feelings as a platform to check our decisions against it's really a great way to stay on track for your project. So you begin with it at the very start then you understand that sorting out the other F's of functionality which includes orientation, flexibility, furnish ability which includes ergonomics and flow combining all of these things together they'll actually help you achieve feel a great feeling in your home and you feeling great about your home and in your home as well. Now that's it for episode one of season two the stage is set okay so now we can dive into thinking about all the rooms and spaces individually are you ready? I hope so look forward to seeing you next week as we start with the space most homeowners want to renovate ad or create it's where homeowners spend most of their time in their homes with their families it's the living and the dining area until then head to the blog for more notes on this episode and lots of other great info there to help you get it right when designing, building and renovating your home. I'll see you there. Thank you so much for joining me here at Get It Right with Undercover Architect. If you're wanting to learn more about how to design a home I've actually created a special five step E guide to get you started it's free and you can get your copy now it's called how to design a home five simple steps to getting it right and you can head to www.undercoverarchitect.com/homedesign to get your free copy emailed straight to your inbox and I'll put that link in the show notes. If you've enjoyed listening to the podcast please head to iTunes and subscribe because that way then you'll be the first to know about new episodes and you'll also help others like you find out about this podcast. I'd really love it if you could leave a review to please because it'll tell iTunes to share this podcast with other homeowners like you and if you have friends or family planning their future homes please let them know about the podcast as well. Everyone who is renovating or building can then get support in getting it right. This has been Amelia Lee from Undercover Architect thank you for tuning in and for letting me bear your sacred ally. Looking forward to next time. Bye.