Open-Built® — Design
At its most basic, a house is a grouping of rooms and a collection of roof lines, styles, overhangs, trim, halls, stairs, fixtures, cabinets, flooring, porches, and accessories. Buy enough floor plan magazines and through the process of elimination, you might find what you think is your dream home, or one that's close enough that an architect or builder may make a few changes, or combine the elements in different plans, to achieve the results you're looking for.
While a traditional architect can design your home starting from scratch, he or she will spend about 80% of the total design time drawing the very straightforward three-dimensional shapes that all houses need in order to form their room groupings, structure, and space. With that done, the architect has 20% left to get to the parts you really care about. Namely, items such as an incredible kitchen, breathtaking timber joinery, and all of the highly personalized and individual elements that go into making a custom home.
At Bensonwood, we have created a revolutionary design process created to get to your perfect home more quickly and with less design cost.
Open-Built® takes the experiences, designs, aesthetics, and knowledge of our architectural group as represented in the many countless three-dimensional elements that they have designed into houses over the years. All of these elements are stored in a database for quick retrieval. Special gridded design software allows our architects to design room groupings quickly and add items such as rooflines and dormer bump-outs with incredible ease. The result is that the basic architectural structure of your house can be achieved and even repeatedly altered in 20% of the architect's total design time. That leaves the remaining 80% of an architect's time to spend on refinement, aesthetics, lot location, and the thousands of details that will make your home, your home.
Open-Built® is so efficient and precise that Bensonwood architectural design services are actually billed by the square foot instead of by the hour. Whether the final build cost of a Bensonwood home is $300,000 or over a million, fixing the design rate and quickly getting to the basic form of the house lets homebuyers concentrate on the most satisfying aspects of the home--refinement of the actual design.
Picking a home based solely on a floor plan is like saying you've been to Yosemite because you saw it on a road map. Like Yosemite, a home shows its form in three dimensions--the same three dimensions in which you live.