Home Design Guide

Home design requires lighting as well as decoration to create comfortable and personalized living space. Home designers in the Houston area frequently partner with lighting and electrical experts like ILD because they know their services will only look better when placed in the best possible light. Home remodeling often requires advanced home electrical systems and circuitry work that only licensed professional electricians can perform. The intricacies and often complex color schemes of interior home design require specialized lighting controls and multiple layers of light to be completely revealed; and home exteriors and landscapes require specification grade home lighting systems and equipment to blend architecture and indigenous vegetation into a harmony of luminance that is both directionally focused and economically cost effective.

Home Remodeling

Houston home design firms often remodel and expand existing homes, creating new interiors and spaces that must be properly wired, grounded, and protected to comply with local electrical regulatory codes. If you are currently having your home remodeled, be sure to contact a certified electrical design firm who can partner with your home design firm to ensure that new home wiring is installed correctly and safely. Any number of steps may end up being taken by our team to safeguard the operability and reliability of your home electrical wiring. These upgrades may include a new circuit panel, new outlets, and dedicated circuits for sophisticated electronics, home theater systems, and major appliances that require an individual source of power to work correctly.

After completion of all necessary electrical panel upgrades, we recommend you take an additional step and invest in one or more protective measures to safeguard your home’s access to uninterrupted power. During Houston area thunderstorms, tropical storms, and hurricanes, lighting can cause voltage to spike in homes throughout entire neighborhoods. This can destroy appliances and circuit panels if a whole house surge suppression system is absent. Investing in a surge suppression system protects your circuit panel, dedicated circuits, and power outlets that feed electricity to your entertainment, communication, and daily living systems. You may need more that this, however, if the power grid itself goes down in your neighborhood. A reasonable investment in an electrical generator will enable you to maintain power to your home so that you may continue to receive vital news and communication services if a major crisis knocks out the power in the city.

Interior Lighting

If you have hired an interior decorator in the past, you have already invested considerably in exquisite home design and beautification. Without the proper lighting, however, the full magnitude of your investment can be diminished by shadows or glare. Finding the balance between light and darkness is critical to showcase many of your home’s unique designs and points of differentiation such as vaulted ceilings, trusses, coves, custom kitchens, dens, and guest bathrooms. Homeworks lighting controls installed make fine tuning your home’s interior lighting design as simple as tuning a stereo dial or pushing a television remote. As a vendor of Lutron, AMX, and Vantage lighting controls and software, we can both program automated lighting sequences into various rooms of your home to correspond with specific activities, and we can give you one touch manual control over any luminaire or multiple layers of lighting within a room.

Consider the value that proprietary, hidden display and fine art lighting fixtures can add to your interior home design in places like private libraries, ornamental displays, gun racks, and antique cases. Knowing where to install these fixtures and how to precisely adjust them requires a blend of science and art. Using advanced photometric analysis software, our home lighting designers can render your interior home design in three dimensions and both calculate and illustrate the outcome of multiple lighting systems we can install upon your approval.

House Lighting

Make it a point as well to work with a lighting design firm that understands the disciplines of architecture and knows how to illuminate the exterior design of your home as an aesthetic unto itself. Without light, the beauty of your house remains hidden at night. Companies like Illuminations Lighting and Design know how to bring this hidden beauty to the forefront in a manner that will impress the entire neighborhood without annoying it. Only specification grade, US-manufactured lights are used in exterior home design lighting, and all of these fixtures now are being made with light pollution controls and reflectors that keep the light focused only on your house so your neighbors will be impressed-but never annoyed-by its presentation.

This can also be done very cost effectively in keeping with the principles of “Green Energy.” Most house lighting fixtures we use are low voltage and will keep power costs down and still put your home in the best light. Furthermore, because we take a less-is-more approach to equipment, we utilize photometric calculations and optimal angles to spread out more light with fewer physical luminaires.

Landscape Lighting

Landscape lighting unifies the illumination of your exterior home design with the geometry of Nature Herself. Low voltage, energy efficient fixtures will keep your power costs down and create safer environments for children and pets. If you work with a firm such as ILD who partners on a regular basis with reputable Houston landscapers such as Dawson Estes Landscaping, you can actually receive turnkey landscaping services that transform the landscape and the lighting all at the same time. Proprietary methods of environmentally friendly outdoor tree lighting and innovative path, garden, and patio lighting can make your home both a sanctuary for private times and a hotspot for weekend entertainment should you wish to throw an outdoor party. Even more importantly, landscape lighting systems can be automated to work on timers or turn themselves on or off according to exterior lighting conditions.

Best of all, if your home is protected by a home security lighting system, you can can have your outdoor lights linked to your alarm controls so that any intruder will be blinded by immediate, unexpected light at the same time the system signals the police.

During the development of your custom home design, there are numerous floor plan features that should be considered.  Maximizing the enjoyment of your custom home can be accomplished by devoting ample thought to key areas of the overall floor plan.  Areas of consideration for your custom home design should include and open layout concept, ceiling heights, traffic flow, recreational areas, sight lines and exterior views.

Becoming a key feature of almost every custom home design, an open floor plan concept allows better flow between spaces.  A good custom home design floor plan will maximize the useful square footage of the custom home while also creating a sense of special separation.  One way to achieve this effect is implementing half walls as a design element between rooms.  Maximizing the open concept for your custom home design can also be done by separating each space with a change in floor treatments.  The open concept can also have some influence on how the ceiling heights affect the whole design.

Varying ceiling heights or changing the design elements of the ceiling can also create an open feeling throughout the custom home.  Tall ceilings and vaulted ceilings are popular trends used to create the open concept of the custom home design floor plan.  It is common to see ceilings in great rooms achieving heights of 20 feet either by vaulting or 2-story space.  Additionally you will find ceiling heights of 9 to 10 feet in kitchens, dining rooms and bedrooms of new custom homes.

Particularly in an open concept custom home design, the floor plan must cater to the overall traffic flow throughout the home.  Single story custom homes typically have bedrooms adjacent to a family room or media room.  When designing these areas, Design Alternatives also makes sure too much traffic flow doesn’t cross over one another since the kitchen is usually located in proximity of the family room as well.  Although the importance of traffic flow is often neglected in custom home design, experienced designers will also give much consideration to the location of stairways in the overall traffic flow scheme.

Home technology and home theaters have also increased the necessity and importance of recreational areas as a key aspect of custom home design.  Adequate thought must be given to not only identify where the television screen will be located, but also how the furniture will lay out around the home theater speakers and components.  If the recreational area is not attached to the kitchen, consideration must also be given to including a wet bar as part of this floor plan concept.

As previously mentioned the open concept has become an increasingly important feature of new custom home design.  By creating an open floor plan, it opens up sight lines between spaces and to the outside.  A quality custom home design incorporates wall openings and doorway locations to utilize critical sight lines.  Limiting sight lines not only creates a mundane space, but will also make the whole house feel smaller due to the visual obstructions.  These sight lines should open up all the way to the exterior surroundings as well.

Locating the house on the building site is just as important as the custom home design itself.  Care should be given in considering how the sun will enhance the natural lighting throughout the home.  If there are certain views that should be maintained, window type and positioning are also critical features which need to be planned out.  Design Alternatives Custom Home Design incorporates all these important aspects when designing each and every floor plan.  Your dream home is a big investment, so your custom home design should be completed by a designer who knows how to maximize all these important features.

There are many factors in feng shui home design that ought to impact somebody’s decision to purchase a house. When you go house hunting, it’s vital that you have some basic knowledge of feng shui principles to help with the decision making process. There are a number of things to look out for, all of which will help you establish whether or not the house has good ‘qi’ or energy linked to it. If there are too many problem areas, it’s a sign that you’ll be negatively impacted if you choose to live there.

Once inside the house, you will need to carefully observe the structure and entire floor plan of the house. Things to look out for include slanted ceilings, exposed ceiling beams, missing doors and corners. Other important structural features such as the position of doors in relation to windows, the location of stairs in relation to the front door and others are all factors to take into consideration. Problem areas will very likely create bad feng shui, but keep in mind that there are cures for these problems. These cures are usually very effective and they are accomplished by utilizing simple tools including crystal balls, wind chimes, water fountains and mirrors. The one reason to completely reject a house is if there are way too many problem areas.

There can also be a number of outside influences that you need to bear in mind . The surrounding community is just as important as the house itself. Go around the neighborhood to get an idea of some of the other things which can impact your life. Avoid buying a home that is found near cemeteries, police stations, hospitals, waste management facilities or any other sites that may adversely affect your home. Landscaping in the front of the house should be inviting for the ‘qi’ to flow right into your home. Make sure that the lawn and shrubs are fresh and never wilting, and in addition check for trees blocking the main entrance.

Remember to keep these pointers in mind when you are on the hunt for a new house. Another cool tip that should never be overlooked is to get to know the current homeowners. Find out the reason they may be selling, this can be a very good indicator of how feng shui will ultimately affect you if you select to live there. It’s an excellent sign if the current homeowners are leaving to move onto bigger and better things. When you already live in a home that you purchased, it is not too late to put these tips to use either. Learn more about the structure of your house along with the environment around you, then use your findings to determine the correct remedies to apply as a quick fix.