Interior design of your home: our advice for success

Designing your custom home is a very exciting project. But starting from scratch to draw up your house plans can be a real headache. The fear of making a mistake, forgetting important elements or simply not feeling comfortable at home can block you from making your choices. To help you get started with confidence, discover our best advice for designing your future home.

How to place the rooms of a house?

Drawing up a complete plan for your new home can seem like a long and complex task. To get started and gradually move forward with the layout of your home, you can (should?) break down the design of your layout into several simpler and more identifiable tasks.

The first thing to do is to list your needs in terms of rooms and surface area . While it is true that individual houses always offer the same type of organization (living room, kitchen, bedrooms, etc.), not all of them perfectly meet your needs.

Do you need/want two bathrooms? What equipment do you want to install (bathtub, shower, single or double sink, washing machine)?

This list will be the starting point for determining the approximate surface area of ​​your future home . For information, here is the list of “standard” surfaces to allocate to each room:

living room : at least 25/30 square meters to accommodate a lounge and a dining area;

kitchen : about 10 square meters, or even more;

bedrooms : at least 9 square meters to be considered as such (14 to 20 m² for a master suite, 12 m² for a child’s bedroom);

bathroom : between 4 and 6 square meters;

various clearances and toilets : allow around ten additional square metres to take into account the corridors and toilets of the house;

garage : 15 to 20 square meters minimum for a motorized vehicle.

These sizes are of course informative but can be used as a basis for estimating the surface area of ​​your home.

An inventory of your current home can also help you. For example, if you are short on space in your kitchen, do not hesitate to take its measurements to find out its surface area. This will help you deduce the minimum surface area to devote to your new kitchen.

Think about extra rooms

Once the “classic” needs have been determined, you can ask yourself if additional rooms would be useful and pleasant in your daily life. These are “bonus” rooms such as an office if you often work from home, a laundry room, a pantry, a wine cellar or even a dressing room.

You can adapt this list to your hobbies and lifestyle . Also think about technical elements. Some heating solutions such as heat pumps require a lot of space and sometimes require a dedicated technical room.

When you’re looking to design your future home , it’s tempting to want to integrate all these rooms into your new home to make it as comfortable as possible. Just keep in mind that each additional space represents living space and therefore an additional cost during construction. The key is to put your requests on paper, then adjust and prioritize the different points on your list.

For example, if you are considering including an office and a guest room in your design plans, there are solutions to provide for these two spaces without adding two additional rooms . A single room can possibly provide both functions, the office space can be installed in a fairly bright hallway or the “guest room” function can be provided by a convertible sofa on occasion.

If you do not want to make concessions in terms of surface area to reduce the cost of construction, these can be found in the choice of equipment or even the level of finishing of the house .

During your first meetings with individual house builders, do not hesitate to ask them for advice on the consistency between your work budget and your specifications .

Zoning is presented in the form of a very simple diagram highlighting the connections between the different rooms . It is not a scale plan but a very visual representation of the connections between the different spaces. This reflection focuses on the practical aspect of the layout .