A family home should be an expression of family life. And so, to design a family home that adapts as life changes, we, as residential architects, must understand and anticipate how families themselves evolve over time. There are aspects specific to individual clients. But there are rhythms to family life that can certainly be understood broadly, and are the reference point in beginning to lay out a family home.
How Family Life Shapes Family Home Design
Broadly speaking, the rhythm of family life is like breathing – inhale, exhale, inhale again. In the early years of a young family, togetherness is key. Parents want to be close to young children. The home is busy. But as children get older, there is more need for personal space. In young adulthood, and beyond, privacy is very important. As is a greater sense of agency over space. Then children leave. After many years, the dynamic shifts. The home is quiet again. Now it is just the parents at home, with visiting family or guests to accommodate intermittently.
In time, grandchildren arrive, and spaces need to once again enable an easy closeness.
There are, of course, many ways in which families may evolve differently. But this common rhythm is very often our starting point.
Why Family Home Designs Begin With a Question
Designers must understand the now, and anticipate the future. We must continually ask ourselves and our clients “What else?”
What else might this family need? What else could happen in this room? What else is this brief telling me, if I read between the lines? What else does the client see in their future? What else could make our clients’ lives easier?
How Foresight Lets a Family Home Adapt Over Time
It is said that hindsight is a powerful thing. But in designing a family home that is able to adapt over time, it is foresight that is essential.
It is foresight that informs a successful layout for a family home.
It is foresight that informs the placement of rooms and the relationships between spaces in the home.
It is foresight that ensures that zones can be isolated in future to ensure that the home is comfortable and intimate for two people.
It is foresight that enables one room to become something else in time. It is foresight that enables additional rooms to be seamlessly added to the home when the need arises.
It is foresight that enables us to anticipate the many interactions of a home, and to design for them.
Planning 4 and 5 Bedroom Home Designs that Still Feel Intimate
In a larger family home, foresight asks questions like these:
- If a guest room is placed immediately adjacent to a primary suite, how do we ensure privacy between them, not just their separation, but the journeys to and from? How do we remove hallway interactions?
- In moving through the home, how does the architecture enable positive interaction? Do we take long hallways past rooms, or do we deliberately take movement through rooms, bringing people together?
- If a brief doesn’t call for a second living space, do we suggest it, anticipating its need in the future?
- How does a home that needs to accommodate four or six, or more people for many years, feel intimate for just two?
It is foresight that enables a carefully placed library to become a nursery for grandchildren for a brief time.
Family Home Design in Practice at Melody House
Melody House in the Southern Highlands is a good example. It was designed around the rituals of family life, for a family of accomplished musicians. Music-making shaped the arrangement of the rooms, and the subtle acoustic detailing between them.
The shared areas are open and fluid. The family comes together easily. But the private spaces offer retreat when it is needed.
Here, the brief asked for closeness and for privacy. Foresight allowed the home to offer both.
Planning for Multigenerational Living and Ageing in Place
The rhythm of family life does not always end with an empty nest. Adult children may return home for a time. Ageing parents may one day need to live closer to family. And so multigenerational home design must look further ahead still.
Again, it is foresight that matters. Could a ground-floor study become a bedroom suite one day, with its own bathroom and an easy connection to the garden? Could hallways be generous enough, and thresholds level enough, to be comfortable at any age? If a home sits across more than one level, could storage be stacked so that a lift can be added later?
Questions like these are simple to resolve in the architectural design phase. They are much harder to answer once a home is built.
This is what ageing in place asks of a home: that the house a family raised its children in can be the house the parents grow older in.
The Art of Designing a Family Home with In-Built Flexibility
There is an art to the spatial planning of a family home. And this art is honed over years of experience and observation. And of course with moments of hindsight.
Getting this right is what gives a home an “in-built flexibility”.
If you’re planning a family home in Sydney or the Southern Highlands that will adapt as life changes, reach out to Cadence & Co to start that conversation.