This is Day 205 of the Slow Home Project and we need you to join us in our quest to evaluate the design quality of houses in nine North American cities in nine months.
It’s Thursday, August 12, 2010 and today on the Slow Home site, we are doing an “In Detail” episode looking at bedroom design in single family houses. All of the examples we have pulled are from the Atlanta area.
In a Slow Home, bedrooms must have a logical place for the bed, good circulation, well designed closets as well as natural light and ventilation. It is important to look at all the bedrooms in a home when evaluating the overall design quality of bedrooms for the Slow Home Test.
We need you to find examples of both good and bad bedroom design from the Atlanta area, ten post them to the site along with your comments so we can have a discussion!
When you are ready, you can click on the player below to watch John and Matthew’s tutorial on both good and bad bedroom design.
To see the examples in more detail, click on the links below.
1. This is a good example of bedroom design. Note how all the bedrooms face either the front or back yards and note the closet size and proportion. This layout is simple and light.
2. This is a bad master bedroom layout – this is a super-sized space with an additional jumbo sized “sitting room” that is oriented to the side yard with a tiny window. The access to the closet through the “sitting room” is also really bad design.
3. This is a terrible master bedroom design – notice the 45 degree angled hallway that connects the master bedroom with an additional sitting area – why all the sitting areas next to the master bedrooms in Atlanta?
4. In this house, the ensuite location in plan results in the master bedroom only having a side yard orientation. This is really poor given the size of the home. Also notice the tiny “sitting room” at the bottom of the master bedroom – how would this space be used?
5. Again, in this example, a poorly laid out plan results in the closet and ensuite taking up good potential window space oriented to the back yard – this results in the second bedroom having a side yard condition.
6. This master bedroom is “L” shaped and will always be awkward to furnish.
7. In this plan, bedroom 3 is a very strange shape – where would you put the bed? Also, look at how the master bedroom itself has no windows! You have to walk past by the faux columns and get into the “sitting room” in order to be near any windows in this room!
8. This is also poor planning because the “loft” space takes up all of the valuable space at the front of the house, forcing the second bedroom into a side yard condition. If the “loft” and bedroom had been switched, this could have been avoided! (An even better solution would be to eliminate the useless loft all together.)
See you tomorrow for our Friday review of the Design Projects from Wednesday as well as our announcement of who is the Slow Homer of the Week…..and do you think there will be a vote for Best Single Family Home in Atlanta? Are there any worthy projects? Check back tomorrow to see!
