Coming up with our Exterior Look
One very different aspect of designing Lewis Loft 3.0 completely custom is that in both of our previous homes, our exterior designs were very limited. We were able to choose colors and little details like whether we wanted stone or not. That was basically it! Each builder had a few elevation styles to choose from, and then within that elevation, you could select colors for predetermined materials. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that the exteriors were the easiest decisions because there were so few options in both cases.
That is so far from how it is when you’re designing a custom home.
The possibilities and styles are seemingly endless when you start to really look. So, we prioritized the following considerations:
Where we are building our home - what is the area like? We knew we’re building a small country town among many farms. It would look very strange and out of place if we built something overly modern or like a coastal-looking beach house. That stuff does matter. We took slightly into consideration what the surrounding homes look like, so we aren’t building something that stands out like a sore thumb.
What type of house we wanted (i.e. two-story, rambler, etc.) This was the easiest decision for us because we’ve known pretty much from the beginning that we want a rambler - no basement, no bonus room. I hate stairs and after living in a two-story townhome, I never want stairs again in my house.
Those considerations helped us land on a few different styles we could aim for, but we ultimately settled on a farmhouse-style home. Other considerations can also be the size and shape of your lot, but those didn’t really come into play for us because our lot is large enough to accommodate any size or shape we may have wanted.
Once we got to this point, we started with some photos of houses we liked. The point of this was to help us start to see similarities in the designs we liked so we could communicate with our designer what we were visually drawn to. We were told that this was a huge help! What you don’t want to do is not communicate anything in terms of style and have your designer send something way off the mark and waste time and money on that.
Then we used this to make a list of likes and dislikes from our inspiration board.
Likes
Wood beams and columns
Wood craftsman trim above windows
Black windows
Lighter colors of exterior
Vertical wood siding/brick combo
A wider visual frontage
French doors for the front door
Side entry garage
Big wrap-around covered front porch
The aesthetic of a metal roof
DISLIKES
Dormers or faux windows in the roof lines
Shutters
Too much stone - prefer brick over stone and only as an accent
Front facing garages
Too many steps up to the front porch - just a few is fine
What’s really fun about this for me is this entire process feels so similar to the design process I have followed for years with graphic design and that I learned in college. It’s really cool to see it applied in different ways and how useful it is to apply here.
