GMH designs buildings (and other stuff like that)
And this time I am going to try to avoid that one or two designs I thought up long ago.
Well, actually, let's just get those two out of the way.
DESIGN #1: circle within a square.
Imagine drawing a circle in the middle of a square. A side of the square is about three times the diameter of the circle.
The front door opens onto the first floor, which consists of that square, plus an extra row of rooms out back. The outer first floor consists of four roughly-pentagonal rooms, where one "side" is actually a convex wall. Think of dividing the square into four smaller squares, then taking a quarter-circle out of the corner of each of them. These four rooms are open to the second floor (i.e. high ceiling), and have windows looking outward; the second floor also has balconies that run along all the walls of the outer ring rooms. On the left is a living/sitting room, on the right a dining room that can also be used as an office. Behind the living room is an adjoining family room, possibly with a fireplace (depending on where, geographically, you build this property). Behind the dining room is a kitchen.
Inside the circle, on the first floor, is the master bedroom and master (full) bathroom. Dunno which way this should be oriented, but probably with the bathroom on the half circle facing the front door. For maximum lulz, put master bath and master bedroom on a rotating platform.
A staircase or two follows the outer wall of the circle, and leads up to a second floor that consists of balcony-like walkways along all the walls (but otherwise open to below) of the outer ring of rooms. Inside the circle, however, is two bedrooms and a full bathroom. The second floor rooms are all lit with skylights.
In the back of the house, there is an "extension" that goes beyond the neat square footprint of the rest of the house; behind the kitchen, in the corner, there is a full bathroom. This and the family room lead out to a screened patio which contains a swimming pool.
The only qualm about this design is that the master bedroom and master bath have no natural lighting, barring perhaps some columnar lights coming downward from passages placed in or between the rooms of the second floor.
If you want a garage, that can pretty much adjoin the house on any side.
DESIGN #2: the grand cape.
The "cape cod" style of house is usually a small-ish house, with an abbreviated second floor (sometimes called "one-and-a-half stories"), possibly with its distinctive "dormer" windows. But in this case, we make it huge and awesome. This idea is actually not particularly complex, and is actually just a slight modification of what is an existing property that I've actually visited before.
Basically, the idea is that you have a colonial-style first floor, for a cape, but with only one common room -- a formal living room, you could call it. But make the footprint by itself be appropriate size for a decently-sized colonial -- give it about 2200 square feet theoretically, so this is a pretty big size for a cape anyway. So you can have a great big eat-in kitchen along with a formal living and formal dining rooms. Instead of fitting a formal family room inside this frame, though, build a GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM off to the side of the house, adjoining the kitchen and rest of the hallways. We're talking a huge square, lofty ceilings, about 25 feet on a side.
The second floor is above the main frame of the first floor. There, put three or four bedrooms, plus two full bathrooms (master and second). Bonus points if you put a balcony there that overlooks the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM. (SUPER CRAZY bonus points if you make a catwalk that leads to a perch standing right smack dab in the middle of the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM!)
Really, you could just make this a colonial, but the reason I call it a cape is because (1) the house that I saw that was like this (no catwalk or perch, though, :P) is a cape, and (2) the dormers are just kinda fun. Just don't bump your head on the ceiling.
And if you're building this on a slope, you can do even more cool stuff with it. You probably have a basement level of some sort, probably even a walk-out. You can:
* stick the garage in the basement
* build an entire living area in the basement, complete with mini-kitchen and bedrooms and bathroom and common area
* do something even crazier. (Indoor pool?)
Now if you have a (outdoor) pool, at the low end of that slope, you can actually put a full bathroom in the basement, then people who come back into the house can come in via the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM's deck doors, or actually get showered and changed in the basement and come up that way.
Also, even crazier idea if you have a basement: build an elevator. You could put it at the backside of the house. Or for even more spectacular zaniness, build it in the center of the house, at the interface between the "base" house and the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM. Make it open-air, or at least glass-walled, so that it looks onto the rest of the house as it goes up and down. And don't just have a boring door to a danky little flight of stairs cramped between walls leading down to the basement -- have a spiral staircase surround it that goes between the basement, first floor, and second floor!
Well, actually, let's just get those two out of the way.
DESIGN #1: circle within a square.
Imagine drawing a circle in the middle of a square. A side of the square is about three times the diameter of the circle.
The front door opens onto the first floor, which consists of that square, plus an extra row of rooms out back. The outer first floor consists of four roughly-pentagonal rooms, where one "side" is actually a convex wall. Think of dividing the square into four smaller squares, then taking a quarter-circle out of the corner of each of them. These four rooms are open to the second floor (i.e. high ceiling), and have windows looking outward; the second floor also has balconies that run along all the walls of the outer ring rooms. On the left is a living/sitting room, on the right a dining room that can also be used as an office. Behind the living room is an adjoining family room, possibly with a fireplace (depending on where, geographically, you build this property). Behind the dining room is a kitchen.
Inside the circle, on the first floor, is the master bedroom and master (full) bathroom. Dunno which way this should be oriented, but probably with the bathroom on the half circle facing the front door. For maximum lulz, put master bath and master bedroom on a rotating platform.
A staircase or two follows the outer wall of the circle, and leads up to a second floor that consists of balcony-like walkways along all the walls (but otherwise open to below) of the outer ring of rooms. Inside the circle, however, is two bedrooms and a full bathroom. The second floor rooms are all lit with skylights.
In the back of the house, there is an "extension" that goes beyond the neat square footprint of the rest of the house; behind the kitchen, in the corner, there is a full bathroom. This and the family room lead out to a screened patio which contains a swimming pool.
The only qualm about this design is that the master bedroom and master bath have no natural lighting, barring perhaps some columnar lights coming downward from passages placed in or between the rooms of the second floor.
If you want a garage, that can pretty much adjoin the house on any side.
DESIGN #2: the grand cape.
The "cape cod" style of house is usually a small-ish house, with an abbreviated second floor (sometimes called "one-and-a-half stories"), possibly with its distinctive "dormer" windows. But in this case, we make it huge and awesome. This idea is actually not particularly complex, and is actually just a slight modification of what is an existing property that I've actually visited before.
Basically, the idea is that you have a colonial-style first floor, for a cape, but with only one common room -- a formal living room, you could call it. But make the footprint by itself be appropriate size for a decently-sized colonial -- give it about 2200 square feet theoretically, so this is a pretty big size for a cape anyway. So you can have a great big eat-in kitchen along with a formal living and formal dining rooms. Instead of fitting a formal family room inside this frame, though, build a GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM off to the side of the house, adjoining the kitchen and rest of the hallways. We're talking a huge square, lofty ceilings, about 25 feet on a side.
The second floor is above the main frame of the first floor. There, put three or four bedrooms, plus two full bathrooms (master and second). Bonus points if you put a balcony there that overlooks the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM. (SUPER CRAZY bonus points if you make a catwalk that leads to a perch standing right smack dab in the middle of the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM!)
Really, you could just make this a colonial, but the reason I call it a cape is because (1) the house that I saw that was like this (no catwalk or perch, though, :P) is a cape, and (2) the dormers are just kinda fun. Just don't bump your head on the ceiling.
And if you're building this on a slope, you can do even more cool stuff with it. You probably have a basement level of some sort, probably even a walk-out. You can:
* stick the garage in the basement
* build an entire living area in the basement, complete with mini-kitchen and bedrooms and bathroom and common area
* do something even crazier. (Indoor pool?)
Now if you have a (outdoor) pool, at the low end of that slope, you can actually put a full bathroom in the basement, then people who come back into the house can come in via the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM's deck doors, or actually get showered and changed in the basement and come up that way.
Also, even crazier idea if you have a basement: build an elevator. You could put it at the backside of the house. Or for even more spectacular zaniness, build it in the center of the house, at the interface between the "base" house and the GIGANTIC FAMILY ROOM. Make it open-air, or at least glass-walled, so that it looks onto the rest of the house as it goes up and down. And don't just have a boring door to a danky little flight of stairs cramped between walls leading down to the basement -- have a spiral staircase surround it that goes between the basement, first floor, and second floor!
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DESIGN #3: how to cram (students into dorm rooms) really, really hard.
The room is about 10x10x10, or maybe a bit smaller. 9x9x9? 8x8x8? In any case, it's small. And there was even a chunk taken out of it, because there needed to be an adjoining room and that room wanted two windows, one of which was right on what would be the line between these two rooms.
The door opens inward. Each student has to have a bed, a desk, and two large dressers (they're called "elephants"). The room also has to have shelving, and one can make use of built-in wall tracks where one can place removable shelf brackets.
For one person living in the room, the two elephants flank a person as 'ey enter the room. Then, on the left is the desk, and on the right is the shelving, and in front is the bed and a lone window. Everything fits reasonably comfortably, albeit without that much room remaining other than a place to stand and change and such. Heck, if you really needed to, you could pretty easily accommodate a couple guests sleeping on the floor.
The challenge is how to double this.
It's not that hard as long as you're not doubling the elephants, actually. Just turn the bed into two bunks, and put shelves above the desk and a second desk below the shelves.
I don't remember exactly how big the elephants, bed, and desk are, but if you are going to duplicate the elephants as well, then it gets really tricky. Probably the only real way to do _that_, would be to loft both beds, put both desks beneath the beds, and put two extra elephants where one of the desks previously was. Then the shelving occupies the space either above or below each bed -- probably below, if one's desk is beneath one's bed.
One might also have to place elephants with their sides rather than backs against the walls. So instead of having to open up into unshared space, a pair of elephants in the space of the desk might be configured to face each other, such that they could share "opening" space. (Beds cannot fit atop elephants, IIRC.)
The beds are just not quite the width of the room, so you might end up with a little unused space in a corner of the room. Well, someone could put a half-size fridge there, or use that for general storage, I guess.
Unfortunately, it costs over $11 to go sit there. With just the perk that you get an unlimited supply of food. It's also only open 7 AM to 9 PM.
The house was situated right on some sort of waterfront. The driveway barely existed in front of the garage -- just enough to get a car out of the garage and turning. One wrong move and the car plunges into the lake next to the house. Garage level was also, like, basement level.
In the yard there were also interesting features, such as a covered passageway behind the garage that apparently led to a place where a few feral chickens lived. We knew them by now so I tossed them some food.
The interior of the house was a rather classical style, with lots of brown, yellow, and off-white. It was an older-looking house inside.
These weren't normal rentable units either --definitely not your standard bedroom+bathroom+kitchen combos. Well they were, technically, combos of those rooms, and even had living and dining rooms for some. However, it was clear that they were adapted from some other existing architecture.
I can't remember most of the units that clearly -- after all, my parents didn't spend much time there before deciding they weren't very interested -- but the last unit we saw, which was rented by a mother and her two daughters, had a 2nd floor entrance, a relatively small and cramped bedrooms and bathroom on that level, and then stairs down to an astonishingly huge but somehow isolated dining room that was slightly below grade. They weren't using it and it was rife with cobwebs.