On evolution

After a process that had lasted around 5-6 months I was happy with the results.  The house design had undergone a number of variations as I honed its external appearance and interior layout.

The first thing to go was the round bathroom.  I added it to the floor plan as I thought it was all looking a bit too conventional.  I dropped it not only out of unpopularity but also because the shape was not exactly easy to work with from an interior perspective.

The theme of curves took another battering.  The garage roof inspired from aircraft hangers failed to integrate with the rest of the house and the juxtaposition of the flat roofs with one curved roof did not enhance the interest in the lines but proved to confuse it.  With a few clicks it was no more.

Otherwise there was very little change in the layout and general appearance of the design.  Most changes were correcting dimensions used for standard doors, windows and walls.  Although the front facade of the house remained a challenge.  The layout was part culprit, with the walk-in-robe at one end and the ensuite at the other, the walls around the main bedroom were very limited in how the windows could be positioned.  I used an idea of geometric lines indented across the front with windows in a picture-frame type alignment to address this shortcoming.  It failed.

Dani and I were at Circular Quay one day when the answer to this problem was found.  The Bennelong Apartments featured a facade on their South tower that used a book shaped design.  I liked it and that night fashioned a variation to resolve our own facade design.

One problem that a lot of people had when analysing the design was the lack of context.  Seeing a house floating in a space of nothing made imagining the real thing difficult.  The solution was to do some landscaping.  Not being a huge fan of mowing, minimising the grass areas became an obsession.  A pool was a great way to achieve this objective so in it went along with some decking and extensive pathways.

The size of the lounge room was of some concern.  It is an odd shape and the fitment of the furniture showed that having a double bifold door out to the backyard caused two problems.  The first was to work out how the pool fencing would be resolved and the second was that the wall where the door was would be unable to be used for furniture.  So the second bifold was removed and replaced with a louvre window.

And that was it.

On tools

I now had a starting point for the design, a rough sketch.  The floor plan had to evolve and this would require a suitable tool.  3D greatly interested me and my previous forray into Autocad was many years ago.  A friend suggested I look at Sketchup by Google.  After a few hours I was able to get some results and it quickly became my tool of choice.

 

There are many other tools in the market which are probably easier than Sketchup to achieve fast results such as Chief Architect.  But what others lack is the ability to stray from convention.  While it was important for reasons of cost not to stray too far, features such as the roof design, and of course the core shape of the house meant Sketchup would make this possible at the expense of a steeper learning curve.
To make sketchup a little easier to use they have a concept of plugins which can perform programmatic tasks on the model which would take far too long to perform manually.  Three were particularly useful, these were Solid Inspector, Weld and Bezier Curves.

As Sketchup is about 3D it works best when your objects are solids.  That is there are no gaps or holes which prevent the use of solid tools for trimming, subtracting or intersecting two or more solids.  Solid Inspector is a quick way to identify where shapes need fixing to become solids.

When drawing in sketchup each line is recorded as individual vectors.  Often when drawing and correcting the model one is faced with a straight line being made up of multiple vectors.  When changing a 2D shape into a 3D object this leads to unwanted vector artefacts on the extruded shape's sides.  Getting rid of them is made easy with the Weld tool, which joins two vectors into a single vector.

The louvre clip on the left has a curve that has been welded in the one on the right

The final plugin was the Bezier Curves.  The need for this tool was quite specific and related to the land contours.  I recieved from the real estate agent a PDF of the land contours which was not in vector format and therefore not something that Sketchup was able to interact with.  However I could load the image into sketchup and then use the Bezier Curves tool to overlay the surveyors levels.  This was a great time and cost saver.

Now I was armed with a tool creating a concept that would illustrate the design properly would now be possible.