While looking through pictures of custom homes and beautifully renovated spaces is fun, it may feel a little like spinning on a hamster wheel. You see a lot of beautiful things, but you don’t necessarily make any progress on choosing your designer or narrowing down your own tastes and desires for your custom home. Whether you’re looking at a builder’s portfolio, a design website, or your Pinterest board, there are ways to look at these inspirational photos more productively. Following our method, you’ll be able to nail down what you love (and don’t love) so you can better communicate your dreams and end up with a better custom home. Here’s how to do it.
Organize & Take Notes While You Look
It may seem a little odd to search through your images with a Word document open but taking notes will make your inspirational journeys much more productive. While you can collect images that you like, it’s hard to see patterns in what you like, especially if you have eclectic taste, when you just have pictures. Sorting the images and taking a moment to write some notes on them will help you clarify your thoughts, and it will enable you to communicate your needs and wants to your designer.
When you make your notes, sort images by the following categories:
Room type: When designing a specific room, it will be useful to have all of your inspirational images organized by room.
Color inspiration: Are there colors that you’re drawn to? Organizing your photos can help you see these patterns.
Style type: One of the most important ways to organize your photos is by style, especially if you’re not sure what kind of style you’d like your home to be in. If you’re not sure how to identify the style, start searching basic styles to get a feel for them and if you like them.
Products: At this stage, you might not look for specific products, but just the kind of product that matters to you. Or lighting fixtures, bathtubs, or hardwood flooring always drawing your eye?
Features: Are you drawn to wainscotting, cathedral ceilings, or columns? Organizing by features will help you see it.
Questions to Ask Yourself
What about the actual notes? You should consider writing out your answers to these questions for each relevant photo, or just the handful of photos that speak to you the most:
What draws you to this space the most? By identifying your favorite parts of a space, you’ll start to see what is most important to you.
How does this space make you feel? Sometimes the energy or the feeling of the space really speaks to you. You may want your space to feel cozy, clean, or energizing. This may vary based on room type.
What style is this space? As we mentioned, specifying a style may be challenging for those who don’t have a design background. However, if you collect a few images of the styles you like, your designer can tell you what the style is.
Are there are any features or products you like most? Selecting the specific products or features you like in the image helps you learn what you might want in your own home.
Are there materials or finishes you like? Some materials and finishes just speak to you. In fact, materials that are focal points for the room, like a kitchen countertop or bedroom headboards, may be very important materials to you.
What don’t you like? It can also be important to pin down what you don’t like about a style or space, so your designer can personalize your design instead of just following a generic style.
Once you have answered all of these questions, you should review your notes and ask yourself if there are any patterns to the images that you’re most drawn to. Be sure to dig a little deeper with the patterns that you notice. For example, you may find that you like fireplaces. Take a look at all of the fireplaces that you enjoy and look for patterns like materials (stone or brick), color, style, height, type (gas/wood/electric), and placement of the fireplace in the home. You can do this for all the features that matter the most to you.
Find Specific Products
You probably found that there were a few very specific products that you really loved. Perhaps you liked a dining room chair, a floating bedroom shelf, or an office lamp. Taking the time to find that specific product, or asking your designer for a look-alike, can really help your home feel like it’s yours. The best spaces are full of objects that inspire us.
Look at the Solutions and Functions
While a great custom home looks good, it also has to be functional and practical to live in. A big secret of the spaces you see in popular design publications is that they aren’t all that practical. If you actually lived in them, you might find their layout frustrating to walk through, the color overwhelming depending on the time, or many other practical problems.
So, when you’re looking at photos, try to imagine the practicality of living in them. This is where a quality designer will really help you. They can tell you how to alter these dreamy spaces to enable your lifestyle and make sure the home is practical first.
Consider Price Range
It’s easy to get swept up in celebrity homes and wealthy mansions. You may identify the features and products that you can’t afford. You can still bring these things to your designer, who can sometimes find versions of the product that offer what you’re looking for but cost less. Maybe we replace natural stone accent walls with a stone veneer, a marble countertop with a quartz one, or slate roofing tiles with dark asphalt shingles. Knowing what you like about a specific product or feature can help us make smart replacements.
Look at Custom Home Galleries
Looking at the custom home gallery of your designer can be very helpful in the design process. Unlike images randomly taken from the internet, your builders will know everything about the space that you’re looking at in their gallery. Telling a designer what you do or do not like about their own projects can be really helpful to get you a home that you’ll love.