Residences
The plan before the view
Every expensive house on a beautiful site makes the same mistake, and it is made in the first week of design.
Houses as architecture
Residences
A house is a set of decisions about where you stand and what you see next. Residences takes the finest of them apart: how the plan meets the slope, why the entrance is on the dark side, what the architect gave up to keep the view.
Residences
Residences
Rooms that work at four in the afternoon
Daylight is the only material in a house that is free, and the only one that is almost never specified.
Residences
What a house costs after it is finished
The purchase price is the smaller number. Here is the one nobody puts in the brochure.
The short version
What separates a good house from an expensive one
Money buys stone, glass and span. It does not buy sequence. The houses that keep working after twenty years share a small set of properties, and none of them appear in a listing.
They have a clear front and a clear back, so that arriving and retreating are different experiences. They put the main rooms where the good light lands in the hours those rooms are used, which is why so many celebrated kitchens face east and so many disappointing ones face the view. They give you a compressed space before a generous one, because a room only feels large by comparison. And they leave one wall in every room without a job.
What fails is almost always the same thing: a plan drawn for the photograph. Furniture floating in the middle of a hall, a dining table with no wall behind it, a staircase used as sculpture in a house where somebody has to carry laundry up it twice a day.
Worth knowing
Ceiling height that reads as generous
2.85 m or more in principal rooms; below 2.6 m no amount of glass rescues the volume
Depth a room can take before it goes gloomy
about 2.5 times the head height of the window
Wall left free in a well-planned room
at least one, ideally the one you see on entering
Circulation share of a good plan
12 to 16 per cent of floor area; above 22 per cent you paid for corridor
The house vote
You can have one, not both. Which do you take?
Use it now
Proportion Studio
Rug, table, pendant, art and walkway sizes for a room you measure once.
Questions people ask
On a serious house, between 40 and 55 per cent: groundworks, structure, waterproofing, services, insulation, fire and acoustic separation. When a quote comes in far below that share, the saving was made somewhere it will surface later.
On anything that moves a wall, yes, and the honest reason is not aesthetics. It is that a good architect will spend the first month telling you what not to do, and the value of that month is usually several times the fee.
Anything that depends on a seal: frameless glass junctions, flush thresholds without a drainage channel, hidden gutters. Then anything specified in a colour that was current the year it was built.
A flat roof is a maintained system, not a finish. It is the right answer when there is a plan and a budget for inspecting it twice a year, and the wrong answer everywhere else.
The Saturday letter
One letter a week, on a Saturday.
One letter a week: the new long read, one room worth studying, one number worth knowing. No advertising, no tracking, one click to leave.