Whether you’ve been planning to design your dream home for months or years, you likely have a plethora of ideas that will make it stand out from any other home around it. Your unique design ideas relate to both the inside and outside of the house. While some neighborhoods have an HOA that may dictate siding types of paint colors for the outside, the landscaping and the home’s interior are your playground.
We at Acipe Design know it’s important to love where you live, and even more important when you plan for your custom home to be your Forever Home. We want to help you personalize your home, from the bathroom fixtures you choose to the color you paint the walls of each room, putting your stamp on things will make the home unique and yours.
Table of Contents
Designed with You in Mind
Your Wants and Needs
Higher Quality Materials
Energy Efficiency & Sustainability
A Forever Home
A Feeling of Home
Final Thoughts
Designed with You in Mind
It’s designed with you in mind, of course, because the design comes from your mind! When you enter a custom home community, it’s anything but a series of boxes in the same colors, shapes, and styles. Individual preferences are allowed to shine through. Open the door to any of these homes and you won’t be confronted with the sea of sameness offered by builders who stick to a single or limited number of floor plans.
When you build a custom home, it’s built to fit your lifestyle, not someone else’s or a hypothetical future client.
Your Wants and Needs
To some, the kitchen is just another room in the house. To others, it’s where they spend their free time. Before I got bored with what I knew how to cook – basics like pasta, heating up frozen foods in the microwave or oven, warming soup on a stove top, and the few sweet treats I’d memorized as favorites, I fell into the former category. The kitchen was just another room that served a purpose that didn’t take much time out of my day.
Once I decided to break the boredom and repetition, I started searching for recipes. I acquired cookbooks, searched recipes online, and created some of my own. Now, I’ve expanded my skills even more – I make dough for homemade pizza and bread sticks, I have several recipes for chicken, beef, and pork dishes my family loves, and I’ve even started to dabble in candy-making. I found awesome milk chocolate and dark chocolate recipes that barely spikes one of my family members’ blood sugar. Our rental has a basic kitchen, which we added more storage to with a pantry cabinet and a movable island with storage and more work space. We added an extra stand-up freezer, too.
Now, when we design our custom home, the kitchen is going to be one of the most important rooms in the house.
For you, your dream home may have four or more bedrooms, or en suites for every bedroom, or a primary suite that takes up its own level of the house. Your home may include a gym, a yoga studio, a sauna, or other health and wellness spaces. You may choose to have a media room or theater that rivals the local theater where you saw the newest release.
This level of personalization will help you feel at home the moment you walk in after construction is complete.
Higher Quality Materials
Personalizing your custom home extends to the materials used to build it. Because it’s not another box in the sea of boxes in neighborhoods with HOAs and other restrictions, there’s a different building standard. Those homes are often mass produced with the same types of exterior finishes, doors, windows, carpet, tile, and more. The builder gets those materials in bulk and gives you limited options in colors, sizes, and finishes.
When building your custom home, you can personalize to your heart’s desire. The sparkling chandelier hanging in the foyer reflects not only your personal style but also of a higher quality than the ceiling light in the dining room that’s also in all of the bedrooms as well as the foyer in an existing home or planned community.
You can choose from various high quality woods and finishes for cabinets, high quality handcrafted items, and other materials and items that stand out against other homes.
Energy Efficiency & Sustainability
Is having a smaller carbon footprint and impact on the environment, both during and after construction, important to you? Have that part of your personality shine through when you focus on energy efficiency and sustainability when designing your new home.
Buying an existing home may be faster than building, but depending on when the home was built will determine how energy efficient it is. It also may not have been built with sustainability in mind. Purchasing an existing home may mean retrofitting or replacing outdated and inefficient materials, if energy efficiency and sustainability are part of your goals for your new home.
Building with materials like bamboo, which has a regrowth rate of up to one meter (approx. 3.3 feet) per day, recycled products like denim for insulation, recycled glass, recycled steel for building, and items created from recycled plastics, and more can make your new home just a little bit more sustainable than the next.
Energy efficiency can be achieved when you use Energy Star rated appliances, select windows and doors and seal them tightly to keep in-home temperatures regulated, and consider the orientation of the home on the lot. Natural light – and the warmth it brings – can save you big bucks when it comes to heating, cooling, and lighting your home. Placing windows in just the right place to spill natural light into the room, and tall ceilings to trap that light can make your darkest room bright again on a sunny day.
Check out our post on the types of sustainable building materials you can include in your home build, and tell your designer about the ones you’d like to try to include.
A Forever Home
The idea of a “forever home” – the home you’ll live in until you decide to retire and downsize, or the home you live in for the rest of your days – is an appealing one. Finding a home that has everything you think you’ll ever want or need from a property is a freeing thought. You won’t have to move again unless you really want or need to.
Personalizing your forever home, through floor plan or interior design, is an important step. If you plan to live there for the rest of your life, adding things like accessible size bathrooms, an elevator, a first floor master suite, all bedrooms on a single level, and more is a level of personalization most people don’t consider a personalization. It’s just a practicality they appreciate, but it’s also a step toward aging in place and holding on to your personalized home for years to come.
A Feeling of Home
When you see the things you’ve done to personalize your space, whether it’s décor or the massive walk-in pantry you designed, you have a feeling of home and comfort. Things are just as you want them. When you’re comfortable and satisfied, your dream house feels like a dream home.
Final Thoughts
We at Acipe Design know everyone has their own personality, desires, and needs. When you consult with us on your custom home build, we’ll do everything we can to make sure your personality shines through every square foot!
Contact us today!