Custom home in Bryan / College Station, by Stearns Design Build. Creating a sense of community is something we strive for everyday. 

Custom home in Bryan / College Station, by Stearns Design Build. Creating a sense of community is something we strive for everyday. 

So far this week we’ve discussed the need to tailor our rooms, our overall homes, and our communities. Here are some suggestions about ways to tailor, and the benefits of tailoring. Tailoring Homes

Remember from Monday’s blog—tailoring includes focusing on creating smaller more intimate spaces and cutting down on rooms that are often unused in your home. You could repurpose these unused rooms to make them into functional, enjoyable spaces. Don’t be afraid of creating multipurpose spaces that may seem unconventional. This is all part of making your home unique, and making it perfectly fit your needs. Make use of extraneous spaces: put bookshelves in hallways, make under-stair areas accessible for storage, and utilize your entry way as a small office or library, even a mudroom of sorts. If flow is preventing your home from being functional, adjust the placement of doorways or even remove walls if needed. With a little creativity and vision, you can really make every nook of your home practical.

Go vertical – expanding upwards instead of outwards doesn’t change the foot print of your home and keeps the surrounding area free for outdoor gardens.  It may be possible for your attic space to be conditioned and used as additional living space. This has an added benefit of preventing your attic from becoming a heat trap and increasing cooling loads on spaces below in the summer.

Tailoring Communities

Communities can be entire city areas, centralized downtowns, and suburban or rural neighborhoods. All can benefit from tailoring and all should reflect your needs as a homeowner/renter, worker, and shopper. In urban city areas, infill is an important part of tailoring – this may be through the reuse of vacant buildings or by building new buildings in adjacent vacant lots. Having mixed use areas is a way to truly fully occupy buildings, with shops or business offices below and housing above. This also begins to create walkable communities, a big part of sustainable city planning. Infill can also be green infill – small public or even private gardens greatly increase the beauty and health of urban areas. Techniques for tailoring are visible in the Downtown Bryan area and in many other small & large city centers in Texas. City centers are a great community resource and truly increase our quality of life

Creating neighborhood centers can also help to tailor communities to our needs. These could contain a public park, business/shopping centers, or other public areas. This could be something you work towards as a neighborhood, discussing your specific needs or wants and then deciding how to meet those through a public center or plaza. This idea makes neighborhood communities more diverse and adaptable, and also increases convenience and functionality.  Imagine if the nearest doctor or grocery store was a 5 minute walk away instead of a 20 minute drive!

Remember our recent blog about three why’s behind green building — Heath, Functionality, & Longevity. As tailoring is a sustainable idea, these reasons apply to it as well! So start brainstorming and thinking about ways to tailor your home into a happier, more comfortable, and lovable place.