Top tips to renovate your home from the Your Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Made Perfect Team
Your Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Made Perfect, the ground-breaking property makeover series is back, but with a difference. This time Angela Scanlon is joined by a pool of six incredible cutting-edge architects who will be transforming problematic homes into dream homes with the magic of virtual reality. You can watch new episodes of the show on Wednesdays at 8pm on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ TWO and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iPlayer.
Here are some top tips for renovating your home from the Your Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Made Perfect team.
It's ALL about design
A big renovation should always be ​motivated by wanting to make a big change to your home and lifestyle. My mantra is​to always consider 3 things: layout, light, and flow. This simplifies the choices in your design decisions and reduces the pressure homeowners put on themselves to get the design perfect.A well-considered layout is key to achieving a well-designed home. ​
The layout must reflect your habits and behaviours, such as your need for storage, extra bedrooms, designated social/rest spaces and your outdoor space. From there you can look at where you can maximise the space available within your budget.
Natural light in an architectural space is proven to help improve our everyday life and wellbeing. I would encourage homeowners to ensure there’s as much natural light coming into the spaces that they ​use most frequently to help enhance daily activities.
Natural light ​can also be a wonderful way to highlight unique material finishes, colours, and forms of a space, helping to bring alive an architectural design. Architectural flow ​is used to help homeowners ​create a seamless transition from space to space.
A useful tip when thinking about flow is imagining all the doors of your plan being left open and evaluating if there is graceful, efficient flow.
Plan, plan and plan!
My suggestion would be to take a step back from thinking about your four walls and look more holistically at the project. Where does the morning sun come in and where do you gravitate to during the weekend and the evenings. Start to make your layout work for you and your unique home, rather than get bogged down in which wall should go where.
Give yourself time
Leave yourself more time to plan than you think. With time you can make sure you can reduce any unknowns (which avoids costly discovers on site) and give yourself time to work through design.
Design is amazing but it rarely happens immediately and quickly - you need time to work through ideas and options to find a solution that truly works for you.
This is your chance to do something amazing with your house - don’t rush the planning stage! Also try and invest in an architect - we are trained professionals who can open up so many avenues to make a truly exceptional every day space which you cannot quite imagine at the beginning of the project.
Get the right team around you to help you through the experience.
Quality not quantity, bigger is not always better.
Good design comes from understanding the existing building; evaluating and retaining what works well and not being afraid to discard what does not. Be open minded yet selective, there is a temptation to be like a child in a sweet shop when it comes to style, finishes, products etc, keep the palette simple, it will be more effective.
Don't get trapped
My top tip would be to not get trapped inside the individual spaces in your house, it is very easy to sit back and think of just doing something to your kitchen, just doing something to your lounge.
If you’re wanting to make a really big renovation and intervention within your house, take a step back and look at the whole house. Think about how you use each room, think about where the sun comes in in the morning, where it gets the best light, where you want to read a book, where you want to have a coffee, and just start sketching out your floorplan with big round bubbles writing in the uses you want to do there and then track the best position in the house to do that.
You can then talk to an architect or designer, show them how you use the house and that will give them invaluable information in order to make your design very personal
Don't compromise
Employ a local architect! Take your time, think what is going to make a real difference in your life, then go for it and don’t compromise!
