Designer’s notes
This is a first shot at my dream house. It's meant to look like like a medieval castle keep (scaled up a bit) on the outside - corner towers, stone walls, narrow windows, etc. - while still providing all the comforts of modern life. It's meant to stand on a hill, ideally overlooking some nice green patchwork or farms and small woods - imagine the views from the roof! The house provides over 200 sq. metres (2000 sqf) of living area (excluding the roof), and I believe it could be built under £1M. The thing I like the most about this design is its symmetry, both along and across the house. I didn't quite finish setting the colours as I'm rather undecided (so I kept everything at defaults), and I didn't bother finishing the other two kids' rooms. (Also, the free version of P5D doesn't let me set the length of fence segments, oops!) There are still two open questions. For one, I don't know what to do with the central bit of the roof. Originally I wanted a traditional pitch roof with ceramic tiles, with fake rafters at the bottom under all the layers of insulation, to complete the feel of the living room as a castle's great hall (bar not actually using it as a dining area). On the other hand, that would completely separate the two halves of the roof space, and miss a great opportunity of letting loads of natural light into the central living room. So for the time being I'm going with the pragmatic yet unsatisfactory choice of flat transparent roof. For the other, I really appreciate (as in our current house) having the access to the garden through the utility room. Be it taking laundry to hang in the garden, or washing veggies brought back, it's way nicer having a door there than having to go through the kitchen. But I don't want to loose the beautiful symmetry of the door in the middle and the windows on the sides!


