The Golan Home

I got some more renders of the house. They show some changes we made and give us an idea what the house will look like in different colors. Architect Shimon Ivgy is using 3D Max to generate the images.

The entrance, gate is open. We are extending the pergola from the driveway – the idea is that a vine will cover it and offer some shade.

Same angle, different color. The light blue part is the stairs are and the second floor – made of wood.

Same color, different angle

The back yard. We add a window to the kitchen, which will plenty of light. The dark red color of the living quarters is not final, but I like the idea of big brass nails sticking out of the wall. We plan to run a thin wire and grow a vine on that wall. When the vine covers the wall, I hope the brass will shine through it.

The long window near the ceiling will let light in above the closet. It faces southeast so we should have some good light in there and privacy at the same time

It hit me that we are done planning. For the past couple of weeks all we have been doing is considering what kind of doors we want, what type of window frames to use, what wood to use for the floors.

All good questions, but nothing to do with the general construct, shape, or layout of the house. I want to wait a little to let all the information settle and see if any more major changes need to be made.

A few days pass by and we are still happy – so, we are moving on.

We’re looking for a construction engineer so we can submit our plans to the local council for approval. We know nothing about calculating loads, supports or anything else an engineer does in this situation so it’s simple picking one out, even though we have plenty of advice from the architects as well as friends and family that went through this process already.

How much should cost be a factor in picking an engineer? What should I look for in assessing one? What is an absolute must, and what is less important?

We got two great visual aids lately: a model of the house (last week, sorry I didn’t update earlier, it has been an insanely busy around here recently) and two computer simulation based on our subsequent comments. Wow!!

Not only that it makes a big difference in how we see the house, it makes clear what is working well, and what needs to be changed.

The model (and pardon the dramatic lighting effect in the photos I took) made it clear that the master bedroom bathroom shouldn’t be a separate ‘box’.

The upper floor unit also had to be de-emphasized.

The computer simulations were even more delightful to get. They already incorporate the changes into a new version (I believe we are already at beta v. 0.9.12): the bathroom is part of the main living ‘box’ and the second floor unit is in light blue. Yuval believes we should make it out of wood, hence the horizontal stripes.

Now it’s obvious that the strip that extends across the entrance way is cumbersome and should be removed. It serves only as an architectural ornament and frames a pergola. Instead, we’ll extend the one above the parking to cover the passageway too.

Yesterday morning we were over at their office for a meeting and played with the 3-D program. It was great, and allowed us to make a series of quick changes and immediately see what it looked like. We lowered the wall to the left of the entrance to about 1 meter (3 ft.) and removed the gate to get a better view of the entrance. Then I set and played with the main color of the house.

We both hated the brown in the original simulation and went wild: tried fuchsia, bubble gum pink, different oranges, dark blue and more. Yuval suggested we create images of the different versions and create a poll here in the blog.

We also tried to work out a better solution for the master bathroom (so it eats up less of the yard) – sample should be here next week.