Still more feedback to the architect...

Wow... it's been nearly a month since we last posted, which is terribly slack of us.
Lots has actually happened, but not much of it seemed particularly noteworthy... but there have been some more house plan updates which we want to share with you. One of those was, however, that although the revised plans showed the main construction material not as blockwork, we have since crunched some numbers with the architect, and have returned to our original plan of blockwork, but built to the new design.
So bearing all that in mind, here's the feedback we passed onto the architects waaaay back on 29 April 2013....

"The Android & I have finally sat down and gone over the revised plans together. We have a bit of feedback, but overall, we both did a happy dance together when we looked over the plans. We particularly love the mezzanine.

I am now attaching a copy of the floor plan, which has been numbered according to the below musings:



Numbered Floor Plan from 24 April 2013



1.       We played around with some ‘to scale’ furniture for the living room, and don’t think that the current arrangement will really work for us. Mainly, where the desk is cuts our floor width in the living area to under 3 metres (and we won’t be able to sit that close to each other without fighting). So, with out brilliant lack of knowledge about building and engineering, what do you think about having the built-in bookcases along the solid ‘back’ wall (where #1 is), and incorporating a small desk area within that? The desk really only needs to keep a laptop off the floor, so doesn’t need to be that large. We would also like to have room for the TV etc to be ‘housed’ in the bookcase area (ie some of the ‘shelves’ will need to be different shapes). The attached photos kind of demonstrate what I mean & I hope make a bit more sense:

Ugly living room design, but has desk fitted in floor-to-ceiling shelving

More like what we are thinking, but with space for a TV

This one has a mezzanine too!

More like the 'look' that we are after

2.       Can we use the stairs to incorporate more storage too?

Possible 'stair storage' idea

3.       Just out of curiosity…What is this rectangle at #3? And what is the dark rectangle near it? (can you sense our ability to read floor plan diagrams?)

4.       While it saddens me greatly to do this, I think we need to lose the pivoting bookcase-door to Viktoria's studio (#4). I really would love to have one, as you know, but I just don’t think it will work here anymore, and looks a bit more like an afterthought. And if we can have the floor-to-ceiling shelving in the living area, we should get enough bookcase space for my million books there. So if you can incorporate instead a trap door, oubliette, or other eccentricity …. alright, all those things will just have to remain unfulfilled on my wish list L. But along those lines, we thought instead of ‘normal’ doors to the rooms off that corridor (ie bath, bed, Viktoria's studio) we could have sliding doors which would take up less room. Again, here are a million pictures to capture the ‘aesthetic’ we had in mind:

OK, this last one is completely inappropriate – but man it looks cool!!

If you could please let me know what you think, that would be awesome (I hope you don’t mind getting these rambling emails, but we seemed to work well getting the last lot of feedback sorted out together this way)."

And the response from the architects....

"Hi, thanks for the feedback. All is very do-able.

I am a bit sad that we are not incorporating your secret bookshelf, it doesn’t really suit the studio you are right but would be good to incorporate some secret door somewhere.

As for the black rectangles, you don’t have bad plan reading skills, we didn’t note them! The one near the kitchen is your tall storage element which will house fridge, cupboards and potentially storage on the passage side as well. The one between Viktoria's studio and the kitchen is the “cat fun house” which we envisaged as a play structure and cosy space between inside and the external courtyard. We can translate this to some additional storage if you would prefer. Anyway Luke is currently working on the changes and we hope to have them to you in the next few days."

We have since thrown another one of our 'brilliant ideas' at Neal-the-Architect, but as this post is getting a bit on the looooong side, we'll update you all with that a bit later.

We haven't heard tale of Neal beating his head against a wall over our constant input (yet)....

V&A