Sometimes The Daily Post offers up a prompt that is just too delicious not to take. Especially for someone who pines for her lost architecture career and has recently been wanting – but too broke – to do more home renovations.
And then this comes along:
You win a contest to build your dream home. Draft the plans.
With a squeal of delight audible only to dogs, I opened AutoCAD and got to work to once again draft yet another set of plans for even more dream home ideas.
Because let’s face it, asking an architect to design their one dream home is kind of like asking a chef to make the one meal they’ll eat for the rest of their lives.
And my dream home will always depend on the exact circumstances of my life at the time, of course. I have no kids, so guest rooms and craft/art rooms will replace the bedrooms. This set of plans has a lower floor area of 1,289 square feet and an upper floor of 919 square feet for a total of 2,208. Still within the manageable range for cleaning, a bit larger than my house now, and most importantly, more bathrooms!
Among the features that make this my dream house are the attached greenhouse, the library with reading nook (which is to say: a bed set into the shelves for good proper book cuddles with cats and tea during a thunderstorm), a nice walk-in pantry, mud room to hose down the people and animals when they come in from the mud, or to catch snowy boots. I just realized I didn’t put the washer and dryer in the mud room but rest assured, they would be there in my dream house.
There is room in the entry way for a coat tree, a bench for shoes, and perhaps fresh flowers in spring in a little table beside the window. I love the way the rooms flow into one another. The kitchen has easy access to and from both the living room and dining room, who also access one another while maintaining a level of privacy as well.
Upstairs, all the bedrooms have walk in closets, and the (theoretical) kid’s rooms are separated by their closets to (hopefully) reduce the amount of annoyance one child can cause another. But as I stated earlier, their actual use would far more likely be guest rooms or sewing and craft rooms.
The master bedroom has a private deck to watch the sunrise, and a nice big tiled shower. The second bath separates the sink from the toilet and tub area to allow for multiple use at once. Though they are on the same floor, the bedrooms are separated enough to allow for a measure of privacy.
The house would be laid out with east oriented up, so the green house would face full south, the kitchen would face east, and the library would be tucked up north, with the entrance on the west side.
Now all I need is about… oooh, $200,000 to build it.
So for today, this is my dream home. I’ve drawn them before, I will continue to draw them in future, but just for today, this is my dream home.
Main Floor Plan
1,298 square feet
© Eliza Murdock 2013
Upper Floor Plan
919 square feet
© Eliza Murdock 2013
And just for the curious, other iterations of my dream home have included – but are not limited to – a library with just enough amenities to make it habitable, a hobbit hole to go in the side of my hill, a castle (on the smallish side), and a yurt.
Creative Metaphor 