My name is Magda and I am the architect based in Chorlton, South Manchester. We are looking at Gary’s and Elizabeth’s house layout redesign today. They are going to have a workshop to reconfigure their ground floor. Their goal is to get a larger and more spacious kitchen and make their kitchen and the living room open plan. We had 3.5-hour concept design workshop. During this time we explored four options. Gary and Elizabeth initially wanted to re-roof the old small extension but after analyzing their budget we decided to focus only on possible internal changes to keep the costs at an affordable level.
We embraced the existing structure and are designing around it to achieve these goals. This means, e.g. bearing in mind where the roof of the existing extension roof needs support. It is then necessary to weight the costs and benefits of having flush finishing walls. During the workshop, I create several options. We leave the final decision until for later. First, we wait for the builders and their estimated cost plan.
Balancing the budget is a part of the concept design workshop. Once we have the plans that are drawn in scale 1:50, experienced builders can provide ballpark figures for each or just a favourite option. It is very important to design the new layout such that we love it while being reasonable and matching the available budget. The best moment to estimate the costs is after the workshop. Once we have the various options on the table it is easy to trim or downsize the design. The cost shouldn’t be more than what we intend to spend or what is worth spending as an investment.
Whether you would like to book a workshop or see me for a free consultation follow this link.
My clients often seek some inspirations online and use Pinterest or Houzz websites or watch Grand Designs or read their magazine.
We live in a semi-detached 1920s house and we're looking to make internal changes, knock through our kitchen and a dining room. Magda has come along and given us
some ideas of how we could configure that, including incorporating as much storage space as possible and meeting our needs. One of our particular requirements was that I wanted to have a kitchen island. Magda looked at different ways of doing that and proposed lots of different storage methods like under the stairs that we can use. She's given us ideas we've not thought of about; where to install a utility room for instance.
She has given us four different options of layouts that we have never thought of. Like glazed walls, window seats that we could fit or roll out storage....
Gary and Elizabeth
She's just given us a lot to think about we've not maybe thought ourselves.
The most important was to show the variety of options that can be done on a tight budget.
The task here was to analyze Gary's and Elizabeth's priorities to fit within a tight budget. We had great ideas like form the Grand Designs... The budget though was sufficient for changes to the house that didn't touch the external envelope of it. We kept it simple and just put the roof lights on the existing extension roof and not glazed it fully with lifting up the roof. We mainly focused on the internal house layout redesign and tweaked four different options out of it.
Pride Road