City villa with office - Feedback & smart optimization ideas requested

Hello everyone!

So, I was busy and already started implementing some of your advice and ideas. Many thanks for that!

For now, I have only focused on the left side.

What came out is a flush left corner, except for the garage. The garage WC and the side entrance as well as the mudroom have been removed, and the utility/technical room now has a more practical size. For your information, it will be more of a technical room than a utility room since laundry is done upstairs. Additionally, you would have the option to store coats and shoes there, so a small mudroom. This way, 7.5m² of hallway space has been saved.

Upstairs, the office has shrunk by 5m²; there is still potential for further reduction, which I will look at in the end after adjusting all corners again.

Overall, I saved 12.5m² so far and am now at 248.5. More to go!

Tonight I would try to cut 0.5 (green box) or even 1m (red box) evenly from the middle on both floors, see the graphic in the attachment. That would save 16 - 32m²! My biggest problem is still the staircase; if anyone has ideas on how to position it so that I can save half or a whole meter in the hallway and it doesn’t look as bad as some say , I would be very happy! In the kitchen and tech room or upstairs office or parent bathroom, I don’t see a big problem; I can easily take from there. It’s just the hallway that is tricky.

Furthermore, I would reduce the kitchen a bit and make the dining room flush with the living room upstairs; that would add 8.5m² or 17m² more for both floors because I would raise the dining room and bedroom again.

As the next step, I would then try the dressing room upstairs; maybe something is possible there with the extra space if I set the wall flush at the top.

I will tackle this again tomorrow evening and see what else can be done.

, yes, I will place the staircase regardless of the optimal option of separation or not. The main thing is that I can save hallway space and it doesn’t look as bad as it apparently does now.

, as I said, I have parted with the separation plans. Do you have an idea how the entrance could present itself from the best side? I hope the adjustment regarding the technical room is better now.

, many thanks for all the effort you put in! I really appreciate that a lot. I find your commitment really great here! I am currently working on the straightening; I hope the intermediate step is okay so far. If I understand you correctly, the kitchen overhang would only be single-story and flush with the rest upstairs, so the roof could be the same? I have to look at that again. The simple is good, but is that what we really want, I don’t know yet. But really, thanks a lot for your drawings; such help is invaluable!

I hope you like the interim result! I would really appreciate feedback.

I wish you a good start to the week!

Alex

My presentations were not intended as suggestions for revision - but rather to exemplify where the draft unnecessarily creates cost-increasing complexities. I just counted for fun: the roof consists (excluding the shed at the garage) of 11 partial surfaces, which together (counting corners touched multiple times) have 57 corners. Just from the wages for carpenters and roofers other people build an entire Flair 113
Although I liked the draft very much on an emotional level, I do not like it at all from a design perspective. Maybe you could show version 1 - I can imagine that the complexity only arose through attempts at improvement. What displeases me - mind you, not stylistically, but purely methodically - is that I don't see one house there at all, but two completely different ones in one: the elevation shows a Gründerzeit villa that is divided into several building body segments (already six here, which can be reduced). It only becomes complete nonsense when the layout of the floor plan has really nothing at all to do with the exterior walls. Here neither the interior layout follows a building body composition, nor vice versa. Instead, two completely decoupled houses meet here: the elevation shows a Gründerzeit villa building composition, while the floor plan shows a 2010 Tuscan villa interpretation based on a 1990 area-wasting villa. The result of the attempt to combine this unequal exterior and interior leads, to put it mildly, to a polygon. So what apparently may have started as an honorable attempt at a stylish building has then somewhere taken the path to a McMansion Hell. This path should by no means be pursued any further into a stage of additional refinement!
So start anew at all costs - and by "new" I mean completely without carrying over anything from the existing draft. First, the question of the driveway must be defined: outside in or inside out, but not both at the same time. Otherwise, you end up again with such a "differentiated" medieval cathedral cloister floor plan with an attached sacristy. If the Gründerzeit villa and/or manor house style is important to you, then that means, if in doubt, priority to the exterior. Moreover, what would bother me about the house as shown so far is that it stands so close to the street - something like that initially needs at least twenty meters of path through the park as a front garden. Perhaps one might try smaller ambitions regarding the appearance?
My presentations of the stepped alignment lines where they would properly belong (not for my taste, but so that the roof does not get such scattered eaves lines) were primarily meant as a wake-up slap for the architect - as well as the compositional clarification shown with the colored partial surfaces: reduce the number of added volumes to three and a half to four, that is usually enough for a structured overall image.

Different style, different plot orientation - but, take a look as an example at the building composition by :

The shell yes, the interior finishing would be additional. But you have to arrange the rooms differently, cut square meters. If more depth, then less width. You have to become cheaper by - cutting square meters 10 to 15 sqm per floor should be possible - simplifying the cubature e.g. removal of the balcony at the bedroom. What is against the bathroom and the study sharing the balcony? Maybe you don't even need the depth. Different staircase, different position

Yes and then we are there ... When redoing the plan ....