What goes into designing a floor plan?

Tim Logel, Vice President, Sales and Marketing for Cardel Custom Homes says it starts with the land and the target customer first then an overall perspective of what that project might look like.

“Developers set the plan with their architectural consultants on what the community will look like. They set the stage and the builder develops the product within the framework of the team effort between the consultant and the developer – the architectural controls for the area. We review the architectural overview with our designers and architects.

“As a builder, we constantly create a database of feedback or recommendations from customers regarding their changing needs as to design. For instance, in the last year, we’ve seen customers recommend homes with more space set aside for a technology room or home office, a home entertainment room, and usable workstations in teenagers’ bedrooms.”

Next is producing a rough draft of the overall concept of unit and building design. Some builders do this in house by gathering a group to discuss what works and what doesn’t. The length of this process depends on the project.

Ian Nash, Project Coordinator for Hawthorne Homes explains, “Our Mosaic design has been refined over the years and is pretty standardized right now. A new product has been taking over six months on the in-house design.”

Even after it goes into the hands of the architect, it’s redesign, redesign, redesign. “It takes a while to get to the point where we’re happy,” adds Nash. “Redesign may be based on the size and layout of a floor plan, the structural design of the building, even a perceived marketability that we’re missing and want to address. There could be a wide range of things that cause us to go back.”

Builders look for an architect with a strong expertise in land-use bylaws, building codes, and structural design. The architect takes responsibility for the overall design of the project and needs to understand the marketplace, the customer, and the scope of the project. The ideology of the builder also comes into play.

Bruce McKenzie is a partner with Poon McKenzie Architects, a firm that specializes in multi-family structures. “You throw all that into a mixing bowl, shake it up, and start with a set of parameters that gives the architect some guidelines.”

Those parameters might include so many one- and two-bedroom units ranging in square footage, parking ratios, and amenities. “You start with that and begin generating the overall floor plan,” adds McKenzie.

“How you put the floor plans together is where the architect really earns their money. When you’re working in an industry as competitive as multi-family housing, you have to be creative about how you put together projects and be aware of changing trends, so that you give the developer the marketing edge they need.

“You put together a general concept, a big-picture look at how you want to arrange the units and what the right orientations are – what I consider to be edge conditions around the site. You respond to those edge conditions by placing units in certain locations by orienting windows and clustering units in certain ways to defend those edges and create a better indoor-outdoor relationship.

“Once you’ve done that, you start working on the specific layouts in the units, although you do a little bit of that at the same time as you’re doing the overall master planning.

“Architecture is very much like taking pictures. You focus your camera down into very minute details and then back it away for the overall landscape pictures. You have to be able to do that continuously.

“The next bit of hard work comes in laying out the floor plans. When you do an interior layout with furnishings, you know where the fireplace, television, and couch are going to go. Often, in multi-family floor plans, they’re so tight that making all the components flow is a real challenge. You’ve got to make sure it works.

“Once you put those floor plans together, there’s the process of ideating how it is going to look, what image it’s going to have. You start injecting what the building is going to look like and working that back into the units.”

All this is done in the context of getting approval from the city. The land-use bylaws provide a starting ground to which builders and architects use creativity and innovation to work around to produce an appealing and successful project.   CL