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home evaluation
a simple, eight-minute quiz with easy yes/no questions on the six elements of a dream home
Many people begin the home-design journey because they simply cannot find an existing house on the market that feels like ‘home’. For these people, designing their own home is a pathway to creating the quality life they dream of living.
Our homes have an enormous impact on the state of our emotional and physical wellbeing, our daily stress loads, our relationships with our loved ones, as well as our relationship with the natural ecosystems around us.
“We could not find a home on the market that we felt inspired to live in everyday after more than 1.5 years of looking.”
– Jessica Richmond, The Barn House
Understanding this before you start your home-design process will lead to making radically different design decisions. Your home can be an extraordinary sanctuary that will recharge you, inspire you and replenish you, or it can be a depressing space that drains your energy and leaves you feeling unmotivated, disordered, frustrated and sometimes even physically ill.
“we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places…it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”
– Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Many people choose to design their own home because they don’t want a standard-issue design that shoehorns the unique elements of their lives into a standard format. Ordinary homes are designed to meet the general needs of the masses, not the unique needs of an individual.
A custom-designed home, on the other hand, is the perfect fit for you and your loved ones. It provides space for your interests and hobbies, supports your good habits, reflects your taste and style, cares for your personal health and wellbeing and creates a feeling of uplift and positivity that permeates through your daily life.
“We decided in the end if we built we could design what we wanted and we thought it would be about the same cost as buying existing.”
– Gail Woodgate, Geminus I
When you brief your architecture team, it’s important to provide a holistic picture of your life, your values and your requirements. At Align we investigate our clients’ needs in six areas: purpose, landscape, function, health, feeling and technology.
“A profound design process eventually makes the patron, the architect, and every occasional visitor in the building a slightly better human being.”
– Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
This holistic system allows us to uncover more than the simple data of how many bedrooms or bathrooms our clients need in their home. We talk about their creative outlets, their stage of life, and how important the carbon footprint of their home is to them. We ensure their home supports good sleep and good exercise, and provides functional places to work, replenishing spaces to recharge and spaces to connect with family and friends.
Above all, we aim to create an environment that feels like home, so when our clients step through the door there is a sense of pride and fulfilment, knowing they are living a life they have chosen and actively designed.
“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.”
– Marie Kondō, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
According to the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Australians spend 90% or more of their time indoors. The built environment makes a substantial contribution to the quality of our lives. And the place where we spend most of our time has the greatest impact of all – our homes.
A dream home can be a tiny house or a mansion, however it fails to be an individual haven if it is not designed specifically for the people who will live in it, and for that you need a custom-designed home.
“Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.”
– Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
from the ‘feel’ to the functionality, take the dream home evaluation to find the perfect balance for your future home
a simple, eight-minute quiz with easy yes/no questions on the six elements of a dream home