1. Your Project Goals

First and foremost, know your project goals!

If you haven’t defined your project goals, do that first. Defining your project goals will help pave the way for all future decisions, including those about the exterior design. I know we keep saying this in our posts, but it’s important and will make your future decisions easier.

Then, use your project goals to shape and define your exterior design strategy

Goals come in many shapes and sizes. They can relate to design style, aesthetics, budget, performance, sustainability, construct-ability, and schedule to name a few popular categories. Here are some sample project goals and how they may define your exterior design strategy:

Project goal 1: Let’s say you have a project goal of wanting a simple modern cabin nestled in the forest.

This project goal is a huge indicator of what the exterior may look like. It suggests a modern design (think: style), a simple modest structure (think: massing and detailing), and an unobtrusive presence in the greater wooded landscape (think: layout, size, and exterior materials).

Based on this breakdown, you can see how those project goals start to determine your exterior design:

• Modern design: You can incorporate modern design characteristics into your exterior design.
• Simple modest structure: You can start thinking about the height of your structure, the roof pitch, and the detailing. You may want to strip down the ornamentation and eliminate trim work or simplify the footprint to avoid ins and outs.
• Cabin nestled in the forest: You may want to start thinking about low-impact foundations, maybe piers. You may also want to select materials and a color palette that blends in with the trees.

Project goal 2: Let’s say you also have a project goal of wanting to be off-grid.

This project goal is a big indicator of how the exterior may function. It suggests you want a design that is energy efficient and that minimizes the use of active systems for heating, cooling, water, and power. This means that you would want to consider passive solar design strategies, the thermal properties of your walls, roof, and floors, and the requirements for the various systems you’ll use. Do you need to design your roof to house solar panels? If so, that would require a certain solar orientation and pitch. What about rainwater collection? This impacts the exterior design, also.

Project goal 3: Let’s say you have a project goal about wanting to keep the building cost below $150,000.

This project goal is a big indicator of the cost, materials, level of complexity, and amount of site work involved. To minimize costs, you may choose to do some of the work yourself so you preemptively design the structure to be easy to construct with common construction methods and material sizes. You may also limit the amount of site work as much as possible by avoiding costly foundation work and avoiding the removal of large trees by thoughtfully siting the cabin to avoid them.

What to do with competing project goals

Each goal can affect the exterior design of your project in different ways and to different degrees. Oftentimes we have competing goals that require us to make tough decisions and prioritize our goals. For example, aesthetics and performance goals often compete with budgetary goals so understanding how your project goals rank against each other is important so that you can more easily determine which goal should take priority over the other in various circumstances. Sometimes you’ll bend the rules depending on the situation, and that’s OK , too!

2. Your Site, Geographical Location, and Climate

Your Site

There are a lot of site characteristics that can affect your exterior design. The topography and site access play a huge part in determining building site location, where parking is located on a site, and the type of foundation to use. Solar orientation and vegetation also impact siting and how to orient and lay out your floor plan. Tree removal is expensive as is laying long underground utility lines whose hookup connections at the house are unsightly and would want to be hidden if possible. Lastly, views, privacy, and security impact your exterior design. Where are the windows, how big are they, and how can you screen or highlight certain views.

By understanding the nuances of your site, you’ll be better able to design your home and its exterior to accommodate it, enhance it, and integrate with it.

Your Geographical Location & Climate

Your local weather conditions and environmental factors indicate performance criteria for the exterior of your home. Design characteristics are different if your site is located in a hot, humid climate with very little rain versus a cold climate. In one case, you may have large overhangs and operable windows whereas in the other case, you may have thick insulated walls and smaller openings. Similarly, living in a wooded area that is prone to fires implies certain design requirements be met like avoiding certain building materials and construction methods. Living along the coast with hurricane-force winds implies others like having tie-downs and avoiding large overhangs to minimize roof uplift.

This is why a thorough site analysis that includes researching climatic conditions is important. Which way is the prevailing wind? Are there nice summer breezes coming from the southwest? Does your location get heavy rains in the summer? And what about the humidity and temperature swings? You’ll want to understand all those climatic and weather conditions when you design your home.

Helpful Resource:

Building America’s Best Practices Series by the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy

One of the most cohesive resources we’ve found to date. It’s a series of guides and case studies that demonstrate real-world solutions for improving the energy performance and quality of homes in the 5 major US climate regions. Just go to the website, find your climate zone, and click through to the resources. Our favorites are the best practice guides. They’re a little technical but we love the guidance and considerations, particularly Chapter 5, which gives design considerations for that specific climate.

3. Local Codes

Local codes, zoning guidelines, deed restrictions, and HOA guidelines can all potentially impact the exterior design of your home. Codes dictate insulation values and energy performance (which potentially impact window sizes and wall thickness).

Zoning codes may prescribe what the exterior can and can’t look like, the massing of your house, the height, the roof pitch, porches, etc. In a similar way, deed restrictions and HOA guidelines may also suggest certain design guidelines like size and material usage.

It’s well worth your time to confirm your local codes. You may find that you are limited to a certain color palette, cladding choice, or even have to present your design to an Architectural Review Board where neighbors and community members can weigh in.

4. Your Floor Plan

There are so many design decisions that need to be made over the course of a project. And it’s important to remember that they are all interdependent and related. The floor plan affects the exterior design and the exterior design affects the floor plan. We often find ourselves looking at something on the exterior (in 3D model form or 2D elevations) then jump to the floor plan and back. Or from the floor plan to the exterior and back to make sure it still works and looks right.

The key to exterior design is to remember to design it in tandem with the floor plan, not after the fact.

The design process is iterative. It involves a lot of back and forth between design drawings, and it is reactive to every design decision you make until the final design is achieved.

Certain design styles have certain characteristics that make them work.

Traditional houses with gable or hipped roofs tend to have “ins and outs” in the footprint to create that curb appeal interest of multiple rooflines, dormers, porches, and screened patios. Those bump-outs need to be considered as you’re designing the floor plan. You can’t assume a rectangle plan will give you the character and charm of traditional rooflines. At the same time, a modern home with a flat roof or a series of pitched roofs may have a completely different underlying organizational strategy to the floor plan to help achieve the look that flat roofs or disparate volumes create.

One of the biggest differences between an experienced architect/designer and someone and a first-time designer or DIYer is in how they go about designing. An experienced designer thinks three-dimensionally. When we start working through floor plans, we are also thinking about how our decisions will affect the elevations, the scale, the massing, and the rooflines of the home. A first-time designer, on the other hand, will focus firstly on the floor plan and then derive the exterior from it (extruding the walls just as they’ve puzzle-pieced the spaces together) OR they will create an elevation and try to fit the floor plan to it. Try not to do this.

Always remember to design them together.

5. Fundamental Architectural Principles

Good design just feels right. This feeling of “right” stems from an unconscious response to good design principles in use. It is often said that good design, when done well, is invisible. And only when it is done poorly do we notice.

Sidebar: There’s an interesting podcast called 99% Invisible about the work of architects, designers, and urban planners who’s work goes mostly unnoticed.  The shows are captivating and tackle complex subjects with a language that is approachable and free of technical jargon. They are educational, enlightening, and most of all, entertaining. You don’t have to be a designer or architect to enjoy the shows and that’s the point.

What we’re trying to say is that good design often goes unnoticed because it is so easy to understand that it just feels natural and the obvious solution – as referenced by Dieter Rams in his 10 Principles of Good Design.

Speaking specifically of architecture, the fundamental principles of mass, balance, scale, proportion, and rhythm help to shape buildings and derive a sense of beauty and “rightness”

Here’s a quick look at each of these principles:

• Massing – Massing can be thought of as chunks or shapes that comprise a home. Think: children’s building blocks. Sometimes a house is made of one big box, other times it is a few boxes of differing sizes.
• Balance – Balance is the visual relationship among parts of a house (the arrangement, size, shape of various components of a house) When there is balance, there is a certain state of equilibrium between contrasting elements. This doesn’t necessarily mean symmetry. There can be equilibrium in other ways that make it visually pleasing like contrast in size, shape, and complexity that still allow a composition or home exterior to feel stable and balanced.
• Scale – Scale refers to the relative size of something compared to something else or to a reference standard. In particular to a home’s exterior, scale often refers to how a home’s size compared to that of surrounding homes or to the size of the lot. When designing spaces, one important reference standard to always be mindful of is the size of the human body.
• Proportion – Proportion is closely related to scale and balance.  But it goes one step further and assigns a module or measurement attribute. While scale refers to comparing one object to another, proportion establishes what the “right” size should be of the second object or what the ratio should be. Think Golden Ratio or Rule of Thirds. But using specific ratios or modules to size objects, it is said that this creates a sense of harmony and order.
• Rhythm – Rhythm can be thought of as a repetitive use of a group of elements, at least three, to establish a recognizable pattern. Repeating windows, alternating materials, and a progression of forms (biggest to smallest, for example) are all examples of rhythm.

When applied correctly, these overarching design principles lay the foundation for the best architectural designs and help create harmony and timelessness. We won’t get into how to apply these principles in this post, but be mindful of these overarching principles as you design your home.