We had our first official meeting with the architect today. By official, I mean we are under contract and have actually made the first payment. Just the first of many, many checks we will be writing over the next year. The meeting got off to a bit of a rough start. We showed up about 10 minutes early, inadvertently interrupting the builders while they were finishing lunch (we met in their office). So we made some small talk while they finished eating.
About 10 minutes after our designated start time, the builder received a text from the architect. He was running late due to car trouble. By the time he arrived, we were more than 30 minutes behind schedule. Fortunately he’s not charging us by the hour. The first floor plan he showed us was essentially a block ‘C’ shape with a courtyard in the middle. Nice, but not particularly exciting. Then he told us he had also done a deconstructed version.
For some reason, I interpreted this to mean that he had individual room layouts that were not connected in a whole house floor plan. Like, let’s just look at the individual spaces. What he actually meant was that he had done a deconstructed version of the house. My husband got it immediately and loved it at first glance. I needed to talk through the whole thing before I could start to wrap my head around it. The block ‘C’ structure was still there, but now the bedroom space and guest suite space had been peeled away and put into their own separate wings, attached to the main structure by wide hallways.
It’s house as art. Unfortunately it’s also way bigger and way more expensive than what we can build. There’s a reason most houses are a box – it’s the cheapest thing to build. So now we start the delicate process of scaling it back while still maintaining the integrity of the design concept. It’s going to be a long couple of months.