House Plans
I do it for fun mostly, but seeing one of my houses built in real life is always a thrill. It’s the best compliment.
I started drawing house plans when I was six. I never knew what the catalyst was, but it has always stuck with me, and I’ve since designed hundreds of them.
These days, I use 3D computer software, which allows me to use more of my imagination than even six-year-old me had. However, turning my designs into working construction documents definitely satisfies the more technical part of my brain.
French Creole Design
This is my favorite type of house to design. Louisiana is unique, in that I haven’t found such a rich and pleasing architectural style anywhere else I’ve traveled.
This style sometimes has steep roofs combined, oddly, with shallow ones. It sometimes has huge columns. And there’s always this wall-height-to-roof ratio that is as impossible to describe as it is pleasing to the eye.
Extremely Large and Ridiculous
It’s difficult to describe how relaxing it can be to design one of these monsters. Unfortunately, I don’t experiment with these as often as I’d like simply because the bigger and more beautiful the house, the slower the computer goes.
As you can imagine, this impacts that relaxation level by an appreciable amount.
3D Modeling
When the available 3D symbol libraries for the Chief Architect software doesn’t meet my needs, I create my own. I then share them with the CA community for free, sometimes going as far as to create training documentation.
Full Construction Sets
Designing houses is good for my soul. But translating my designs into working construction documents satisfies the technical part of my brain.
If you were wondering, yes, every now and then someone will want to build one! I have even worked with spec-home builders to fit beautiful, functional homes on oddly-shaped lots.
At present, the number of my designs that have been built tallies to six.
