How Can I Create Cost Effective Design?

Building a house within a budget is always a challenge. When your dream might be bigger than your wallet you’ll want to know how to design a new home more cost-consiously. Knowing how to design an efficient cost-effective house is the best starting point.

Keeping Your Dream Alive

When we dream of a new home we often envision a large house with a lot of different rooms for all the activities you can think of. A dramatic house with lot’s of nice materials and a dynamic form often pops into our heads.

However, most of us can’t afford to build the ‘ultimate’ home. Maybe the rich and famous, but not us.

To design a home from a cost-effective standpoint requires understanding where the value comes in and where to trim the fat. You don’t want just any home, and you don’t want to live in a bland box. So how can you get to a good design?

Simplifying Your House Form

For many decades the “high-end” homes that have been built have mostly consisted of complex and often overwrought designs. Complex floor plans with lots of exterior corners, with tall and complex roofs have been the hallmark of high-end.

However, you don’t have to have complexity to get great design. Below we’ll discuss some things to consider when designing your new home.

Simplify the Footprint

A simple footprint – how the house sits on the ground – doesn’t mean a compromise in design. Many grand historic homes over the centuries have used simple footprints, from square to rectangular. Think of George Washington’s home Mt. Vernon. Even modernist masters such as Mies Van der Rohe designed the Farnsworth house as a simple rectangle with spectacular results.

The successful design of a simple footprint has to do with the finesse of the home’s scale, it’s proportions, the window placement, and the materials used.

The trick with a simple floor plan is figuring out how to fit the rooms into the form without the spaces seeming to be “forced” into the box. There are many successfull historic expamples, as well as early-to- mid-20th-century examples, to learn from. Many architects today have also used simple forms while creating dynamic design.

Simplify the Roof Layout

Complex roofs are a sizable portion of a home’s construction budget. Designing and building complex patterns of ridges and valleys just raises the cost of a home. Designing a home with a simplified roof form is a good way to reduce cost.

Simplify the Exterior

Every exterior corner of a house creates a condition that involves added costs. Resolving framing, water barrier installation, and exterior materials at corners takes greater manpower effort than a simple wall.

This doesn’t, however, imply that you can’t have more than four corners to a house. Living in a box isn’t most people’s dream, especially if the design is bland. It just means that you keep the overall form relatively simple to minimize the need for corners.

Simplify the details

“God is in the details” is a famous quote by the architect Mies Van der Rohe. This man was famous for designing boxes, but boxes that transformed architecture.

Any time a wall changes direction or two different materials intersect, a complex detail needs to be resolved. Many people think a complex house means good design. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Designing a house that reduces the conditions needed to resolve such issues is an effective way to help keeping costs in check. Again, this doesn’t mean you should live in a bland box with only one material. It just means you can be effective by keeping things simple.

Create Upper Floors

Foundations are costly. They take a lot of digging, creation of formwork, and pouring of concrete. They require waterproofing and perimeter drain tiles if you have a basement. To reduce the cost of your house you could create a two-story house instead of a single-story house. This will allow you to build less foundation, saving money compared to the simpler framing costs of a second floor.

Square Footage

People often think a larger house is a better house. That isn’t true. Bigger just means bigger. A poorly designed big house is no different than a poorly designed small house – it’s just poor design.

A Balancing Act

The challenge of design is to balance your needs with your desires. You may desire a dedicated room to exercise, do yoga, or house a library of books. But, do you really need those rooms?

Trim Before You Cut

If you have a dream home consisting of your ideal list of rooms at the sizes you want, don’t just reduce the number of rooms at first. Think about how you can simplify the design to see if you can get the house you want in the cost you can afford.

Simplifying the design and materials and contemplating what you can install later when you can afford the “extras” is what you should do first. You should only cut your square footage if you can’t get your construction costs balanced with your budget through simplifying the design.

Greater Plan Efficiency

Creating a plan that can get you everything you want at the smallest reasonable size is an effective way to obtain cost-effective design. Reasonable doesn’t mean every room should be small. Instead, each room should be sized to comfortably house all the furniture items that’ll go into the room.

Do You Really Need All of Those Rooms?

An effective way to reduce the number of rooms but still provide for the activities you want is to create multi-purpose spaces. Your exercise equipment might be able to fit into a the owner’s suite or a guest room that’s not used often. You could do yoga in a sunny nook designed into your family room or owner’s suite. Your books could be contained in shelves built into the walls of a living room or a broad hallway.

Figuring out how to effectively plan multiple uses into rooms goes a long way in reducing costs.

Circulation

Hallways are often thought of as wasted space. However, hallways are a means of maintaining visual and audible privace for rooms. Creating an effective plan that allows for needed privacy doesn’t require a lot of circulation. It just means working through numerous iterations of floor plans to get an efficient floor layout without the over-use of hallways.

Closets

Most everyone seems to dream of having a large walk-in closet in their bedroom or a walk-in pantry next to their kitchen. What most people don’t think about is the amount of “circulation area” you’re adding to your floor plan.

A walk-in closet or pantry needs space between clothes and shelves in order to access them. This is circulation space that you don’t actually need. A linear closet accessed directely from the bedroom uses the circulation area of the bedroom for access without the need to add separate circulation. The same with pantries. Built-in pantry cabinets that are accessed from inside the kitchen take up less floor space than a separate walk-in room.

Laundry

Laundry rooms are one of those dream items that everyone thinks is a requirement in home design. However, laundry rooms take up square footage that isn’t necessary. A washer and dryer can easily fit into a closet located off a hallway or as part of the kitchen, using those spaces for the circulation you’d otherwise have to add if designing a separate room.

Many European kitchens use undercounter washer/dryer units, an individual unit handling both the washing and drying of clothes. This might be worth looking into for a home you’ll retire into or for a vacation home.

Plumbing

Though the the cost of running plumbing lines isn’t huge, minimizing the length of runs is another way to cut back on costs. This can be done by placing bathrooms back-to-back, or having a bathroom or laundry on the backside of the wall with the kitchen sink.

Selecting Materials

Another means of reducing costs is to consider modifying or changing materials.

Modifying materials basically means using less of the more costly materials you want.

For the exterior this could include reducing the amount of brick used on your home, changing a full-height stone wall to a wall with a stone water table – a band of stone at the lower portions of a wall, reducing the amount of full-height glass walls, changing a driveway made of pavers to one of concrete trimmed with pavers on the edges, and other similar modifications.

Similarly, you might select a quality ceramic tile floor instead of stone, use carpeting in bedrooms instead of wood flooring, or painting walls rather than using wall covering.

There are a myriad of material options available to you, and less expensive doesn’t mean a less beautiful home.

Simple Things to Add or Upgrade Later

When designing your house you should keep in mind things you might want that could be added or upgraded later when more money becomes available. Let’s take a look at several of these.

Exterior Landscaping

A simple means of reducing costs is to reduce the amount of landscaping you put in when the house is built. Trees, shrubs, and flowers are easy to add later.

Don’t, however, cut out all of it. You don’t want to live in a house with nothing but exposed dirt for a yard.

Porches and Patios

You may dream of having a large porch or patio with an outdoor kitchen or a large deck extending into the yard. These are things that could easily be added later. Be sure to provide plumbing, power, and gas stubs at the exterior of your home to allow for easy extension to an outdoor kitchen.

Cabinetry

Cabinets for kitchens, bathrooms, and laundries can get expensive if you go high-end and add a lot of bells and whistles. However, you could always start with simpler standard-grade cabinetry and then upgrade many years later when you have the funds. The bells and whistles such as specialized storage compnents could also be added if you select a cabinet system that could easily accomodate them later.

Doors

Doors are an important part of establishing quality in design and materials. These are items people interact with daily – you touch doors more often that you touch the walls. High-quality doors with high-end finishes are amazing items to project the quality of your design but can be expensive.

You could easily start with more standard-grade and simplified door styles to get your costs in line and then swap them out for nicer doors down the road when you can afford them.

Finishes

The interior finishes of your home – the materials and colors you see – are another defining factor in the quality of design. Many of these could be added later, such as adding wall covering or wood wainscotting. A vinyl tile floor could be upgraded to a ceramic tile floor down the road. Carpet could be replaced with wood floors when you have the money.

Fixtures

Plumbing fixtures such as faucets and sinks are items that can be easily upgraded. The same with surface-mounted light fixtures such as pendant lights that hang down from the ceiling or light fixtures attached directly to the ceiling.

Furniture

Many of us might want all new furniture or a number of new furniture pieces for our new home. Using the furniture you have now might make more sense, with new furniture being purchased later. Make sure, however, that you design your rooms to a size that can accomodate the furniture sizes you want.

Waste Not, Want Not

The challenge with the concept of upgrading later is that you would be generating a significant amount of future waste. A better tactic might be to just compromise on your design vision.

Compromising your design doesn’t mean you’ll get a lesser home. It just means you might have to tweak your vision by rethinking the materials and finishes for your home. Selecting such items that might not be your dream but can provide a design aesthetic you can enjoy through the life of your home might be the better approach.

All images by Cayl Hollis unless otherwise noted.

Feature image by Vecislavas Popa via Pexels.