Residential real estate did well in 2021, with over 6 million existing homes sold. Yet, the number of existing homes remains millions short of what the U.S. needs. It’s a big part of why home prices have risen so much in the last few years.
As one of the most populated states, Florida is no exception to that problem.
If you can’t find the perfect home, you can go down the other road and build your ideal home. Not sure what the perfect home will look like? Keep reading for innovative residential design ideas that can help inspire your home design.
Outdoor Living
Outdoor living might seem like a bad investment in areas with long, cold winters. However, it makes much more sense in a place where you can sit outside year-round. There are several key ways to include outdoor living in residential architecture design.
Outdoor Kitchen
One of the more popular outdoor living options is an outdoor kitchen. Outdoor kitchens can incorporate grills, sinks, and refrigeration units for food or wine. You can even include a gas griddle if you want to take things up a notch.
Outdoor Living Room
An outdoor living room can offer you a vastly expanded home without a greatly expanded building footprint. You can fuse patio design with pool decks to provide seating and entertainment option. Careful landscaping choices can turn your outdoor living room into an outdoor experience.
Outdoor living isn’t for everyone, but it expands your options for your home without requiring additional square footage.
Smart Home
What essentially started life as a gimmick for the tech crowd, the smart home concept, has seen substantial mainstream adoption in various ways. People depend on digital assistants to, for example, turn the lights on or off or play music.
These days, though, the number of smart devices is astounding and includes:
- Smart locks
- Smart security systems
- Smart outdoor lighting
- Smart thermometers
- Smart speakers
- Smart outlets
It doesn’t end there; you can even get smart appliances to make your life in the kitchen easier. For example, you can get smart ovens that you can control from an app.
Of course, a smart home works best when you design a home for it from the ground up. For example, you must include appropriate cabling throughout the house to support good WiFi signals.
Multigenerational Living
The multigenerational living design approach focuses less on specific features than on flexibility. It looks to incorporate elements and spaces that evolve.
For example, a multigenerational living design might incorporate a living space above the garage or an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard. These spaces can serve as rental units in the early days. Later, they can act as an office area for a spouse doing remote work while your family grows.
As you get older, you can convert those spaces into living areas for a college-age child to get some life experience or even as a legitimate mother-in-law suite. You can even turn them back into rental spaces for extra, ongoing income.
Aging in Place Design
The number of people retiring in good health or approaching retirement in good health has grown in recent years. With the growth has come a more profound interest in aging in place. In other words, people like the idea of aging in their existing home or in a home of their own design that they have built for them.
Yet, aging also brings with it some inevitable physical challenges. Balance becomes more problematic. Manual dexterity in the hands and eyesight often diminish.
Many senior citizens become dependent on wheelchairs, some or even all of the time to move around. Good design will take these inevitabilities into account.
For example, the design might focus on a ranch-style house to eliminate steps. The design can include extra lighting to make seeing potential obstructions easier.
Many interior doors aren’t wide enough for the average wheelchair to pass through. The design can incorporate wider-than-usual interior doors and hallways. Wider doorways and hallways make navigation easier.
The home can also adopt some smart house features to make life easier
Kitchen Forward Design
The focal point of most homes has moved out of the living room and into the kitchen over the last few generations. People often congregate and even eat in the kitchen.
That trend has prompted designers to allot more space and, often, more light to kitchens than they once did. In fact, open kitchens that connect with dining room or living room areas are more popular than ever.
A kitchen-forward design takes that reality and pushes it one step further. It puts the kitchen front and center in the home, closer to the front door.
When combined with a generous front porch, the kitchen forward design encourages using that front porch for a bit more outdoor living. All it takes is a set of comfortable outdoor chairs and a table to turn your front porch into an outdoor dining room during good weather.
As a side effect, it can encourage interaction between immediate neighbors and general exchange between residents in a given neighborhood.
Innovative Residential Design and You
With low inventory in the residential real estate market, you often can’t find one with a design you like. In cases like that, you can get an innovative residential design that meets your needs exactly.
That might mean a home geared to outdoor living or focusing intensely on smart home technology. Planning on staying put? You can lean into a multigenerational design.
For the person near retirement, you can invest in a design with a focus on aging in place.
MJS Designers Group can design your dream home. For more information, contact us today.