If anything the first design you see gives you clarity, and it's often better to be a fair bit off what you eventually want to see. It's sometimes easier to decide what you don't like, and that's where we found ourselves after round one..
Before talking to the architect we'd spent many hours thinking about the brief, and deciding what we wanted to see as part of our home. I mean, this will probably be where we live for the rest of our lives, so it's best to get it right.
After the first round of drawings we turned back to looking through small house designs that we liked, and suited our purpose.
There is an endless stream of great ideas on the web, especially if you manage to lose yourself in Pinterest for a few hours. It was overwhelming at times, but no-one said this was going to be easy.
We decided on a few 'must-haves':
- Plenty of outdoor space: Thailand is hot but we don't like living in air-con. We picked our Bangkok apartment mainly due to the huge balcony so we can be outside
- Connect indoor and outdoor areas: we need protection from the sun, but don't want to be cocooned
- Lots of air and light: because of the hot sun lots of buildings in Thailand try to block light, but in some places I've seen lights needing switched on mid-afternoon. Not for us.
- Decent storage space: lacking in most places we've lived, so for many people everything is 'stored' in the open.
- Spacious design: not point in designing your own place if you end up living cramped (this has obvious budget implications though, which we'll discover soon!)
- Simple design: nice clean, open spaces that we can use flexibly
Not much to ask for, right?
In the end, I grabbed a bit of paper, a pencil and a ruler and sat down to lay-out the floor plan.
Any designer reading this who I've worked with in the past is now holding their head in their hands, thinking, in a stern voice: Gareth, I'm telling you again you are not a designer!
But that's what I did and here are the results. Which is your favourite? Which design did we - well, the architect - go with?
Design A
Design B
Which do you prefer? Leave a comment below
