Small Home Architects create cottages and other modest residences for their clients.
Rand Soellner’s firm qualifies as small home architects because, in addition to designing larger facilities, they also create some very compact houses. For instance, one of their cottages is only about 393 hsf (heated square feet). It is an open plan Living – Kitchen – Sleeping area with a partitioned bathroom/closet. It is on a 2nd floor above a 2 car garage, up in the attic area. There is a stair going up from an exterior door and interior landing that accesses both the garage and the exterior. It functions as a mother-in-law suite, on the same property as a main house.
This type of arrangement can be very appealing, particularly in family village estates where multiple members of an extended family reside on the same property. Small home architects can provide as many smaller structures as are necessary to house people on the site, as long as it makes sense aesthetically and functionally.
Small home architects can save their clients money with economical planning approaches
As small home architects, the Soellner firm has also master planned “diffused hotels” wherein he creates multiple cottages of 1 or 2 stories and scatters them about a trail or road or around a courtyard, rather than assembling them into a large hotel block, which would be many times more expensive in terms of fire protection, construction type, fireproofing, additional area required for hallways, stairways, sprinkler systems, alarm systems and other aspects. This is an unusual approach that small house designers can use to arrive at “homier” and less costly solutions for even multi-family situations.
A small house architect can be hard to find
Small house designers are in demand. It is harder to design a functional and beautiful compact residence than it is to design a larger house. There have been books written about the virtues of smaller houses, some of them by an architect. Sometimes a homeowner might want their main residence to be down-sized from a larger estate house in which they have been living for decades, and now that they have become empty-nesters (children grown and gone), they want a smaller house to take care of with less maintenance. Other people want the spaciousness of a large main house and then desire a guest cottage on the same premises, which is often popular in vacation resort areas. Small house designers can make it happen.
Rand Soellner Architect has designed a number of guest cottages and gets a kick out of how interesting a design he can make them. One of his designs is a 2BR/2Bath guest cottage of around 1,000 hsf. This results in a design that Soellner says seems full-featured, even though it is in a smaller package. A small house architect knows how to get a lot of bang for the buck.
Some of the designs are viewed by new clients, but because everyone is unique, they may either request modifications to one of those, or take pieces and parts from each, or request a design from scratch. Soellner will modify his project management method to suit each clients’ needs and objectives. Soellner meets with many of his clients in his home office, while others are comfortable discussing their projects with him remotely; he adapts to handle projects all over the country by whatever means his clients prefer.
Rand is regularly phoned or e-mailed by prospective clients from all over the United States. Some people are behind schedule and are eager to have Soellner begin their designs, others are early in the planning stages and want to take their time investigating what works best for them.
Contact for one small house architect :
Rand Soellner AIA/NCARB
Rand Soellner Architect
828-269-9046
www.HomeArchitects.com
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