Design Week

After narrowing in on the look we were going for, we set out to finding the right materials to accomplish it. It turns out - we simply live on the wrong coast. Who knew?? Apparently the exact type of house we love is so popular on the other side of the continent that it's coined it's own style. A quick google search of 'West Coast Modern" and you'll know what I'm talking about. We found a ton of information on expressed joint panel systems, & cedar cladding materials in the Pacific North West, but we were hard-pressed to find building

Today kicks off our second Design Week and this time it's all about the exterior of the Dreamhouse. When we left off last time, we revealed the conceptual elevation drawings & first colour renderings of the exterior. Of course drawings are easy. The hard part is bringing the drawings to life to achieve the look we want within budget. The Inspiration: Going back to our look book, it was pretty clear to us that the we're drawn to houses that step outside the bounds of typical "builder beige" brick & aluminum siding. That's not to say that there aren't some beautiful

Well Design Week is coming to a close.  In case you missed it be sure to check out the rest of this week's posts. We first took you through our search for inspiration, then outlined how we focused in on our full wish list and created our look book. Today we're finally revealing The Dreamhouse on paper as we go through Kevin's design and it's evolution from rough sketch to colour rendering. We sat down with Kevin to get an understanding of the process he goes through when he approaches a design project. As complex and technical as his job is,

Once we got through the initial research, we took a more in-depth look at the photos we had compiled. What we figured out is that overall we love modern contemporary architecture and we want our house to reflect that in its design both inside and out. That said, we'd still like to maintain a bit of neighbourhood charm because let's be honest, we're not trying to create an art installation in the middle of the suburbs! We tried to categorize the photos into 'wants' and 'likes.' From there we could focus in on the elements of each photo we actually wanted

Today we're kicking off Design Week - or probably what will become the first of several recurring 'design weeks' as a project like ours just has so many different phases of the design process. This week we'll be focusing on the architectural design. When we decided to chase the dream, our goal was to create a home that embodied the feel of the open-concept, urban contemporary loft, while satisfying our need for the larger living space generally only found at affordable prices outside of the city. To get started, we took to the web to figure out our likes and dislikes in