EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

House Specialty

A stock plan gives you a head start in the design of your new home. But you still need to make the plan your own by adapting it to your site, requirements, taste, and budget. Think of it as a kind of architectural “soup stock” (pun gratefully accepted) forming a good base for a wide variety of interpretations. The trick is to start with a plan that suits what you want to do with it. (In other words you can’t use chicken stock to make a lemon meringue pie). We just launched our new trademarked Customizer Tool to help you modify a plan to fit your needs. Here’s how it works.

Select the plan you wish to modify and then use our icon pencil to outline your changes, like this:

An “Add Your Comments” tab lets you describe your changes and drag the words anywhere on the drawing. Hold the mouse pointer over the line or comment to delete it. Save your changes and proceed and you get the After plan, below:

See how the kitchen island, the double vanity in the master bath, and the front porch have all been changed and where French doors have been added. The Customizer includes a sidebar showing a range of kitchen and bath layouts to help you envision possible changes. When you’re happy with your changes you can request a Customizer Quote. A Houseplans.com Project Advisor will call you to explain the customization estimate including the breakdown of costs, review of changes, written quote, and discussion of options. The Customizer turns a stock plan into your custom home plan. It whets my appetite for design!

Important New Book on Esherick Houses

Joe Esherick was one of Northern California’s most imaginative residential architects and an absorbing new book about him has just been published: Appropriate:The Houses of Joe Esherick, by Marc Treib (William Stout Publishers).

Full of sketches, floor plans, and comparisons to work by other architects, the book is fascinating for anyone interested in regional modern home design, from ranch houses to mountain cabins to urban row  houses. Treib lets us see Joe’s omnivorous imagination at work by showing what inspired some of his designs and then explains how those designs evolved. One sketch for a ranch house and pool is particularly appealing for its wry sense of humor: sharks are circling in the water.

I knew and admired Joe very much and had the privilege of serving on a campus planning committee with him. It was the greatest pleasure to hear him talk about design and his early days in California, like the time in 1939 when he drove Alvar Aalto around the Bay Area to look at buildings and a local farmer aimed his shotgun at them when they were trying to explore his barn (you can read my essay about Joe in Toward A Simpler Way of Life: The Arts & Crafts Architects of California, University of California Press, 1997, edited by Robert Winter).

In fact, I think Aalto was quite influential for Joe. Ta ke a look at Joe’s hedgerow houses at Sea Ranch (on the cover of the book, above) and compare their shed-roofed outline to Aalto’s Maison Louis Carre in France, below:

The photograph is by Doctor Casino through Flickr. The Aalto house is much more elaborate and in a different material but there is a strong similarity in the way each house becomes an abstraction of its site. The Maison Louis Carre is part of the Aalto Foundation and is open by appointment — and well worth putting on your travel itinerary.