Floor plan of a single-family house on the south slope, upper floor renovation can wait

The blue in the plan is the building boundaries, right?! Am I correct in seeing that your "main garden" is more towards the front? If yes, why don't you plan the living room-kitchen downstairs with a south terrace and a view of the main garden and the bedrooms upstairs??? That would have been more my idea...

If the children are not here yet, I would urgently recommend planning a children's room on the ground floor, close to you. Otherwise, the path from the bedroom to the children's rooms is very long, and children simply need parental proximity beyond infancy. When they are older, they can still move down to the basement. This was also the case with acquaintances of ours. As a child, upstairs on the parents' floor, and later down to the basement. And the room on the ground floor can also be very useful as a playroom.

we are only allowed to reach 3.5m on the mountainside, so there isn’t much knee wall possible in the attic and it’s a very sloped matter. And just to put the office in the attic, we don’t want to convert the whole floor separately. The idea of uncovering the window is my next consideration, we definitely need to talk to the architect again. He advised us against digging out + retaining wall because of the costs, but I would still like to do it..

: The hose in the basement definitely has to go, it’s total nonsense, there’s supposed to be a door from the garage as well. The long way to the kitchen is an argument, especially with the dining area as it is on the plan right now.. If I use the cloakroom as a passage now, I’ll have to find space for a cloakroom somewhere else again.. But that should be doable

@Kisska: The main garden is at the top of the plan, so to the north and at the level of the ground floor. My actual plan was also to put the living/dining/kitchen area in the basement and the bedrooms upstairs. However, both my husband, all relatives and the architect advised against that. Then you simply have no view from the living rooms to the valley (meadows, fields, view of the Black Forest) – and that’s why I gave up on that...

@ Manu and everyone before: You’re right about the children’s rooms on the parents’ level... the distances are quite far then.. Maybe the office could be taken upstairs for now, used as a children’s room when the first child arrives, and then moved downstairs when the child is a bit older...?

I think the architect needs to start almost from scratch again... a bit frustrating – or is the first draft never any good?

So for an architect's design, that all looks very amateurish to me - totally unimaginative. And yes, we completely scrapped our 1st draft and started again. The 2nd draft already fit the basic form and only needed fine-tuning. So everything back to zero and starting over.

Then your requirements are exactly the same as ours. You can take a look at my floor plan threads and maybe get one or two ideas. Personally, I think the main entrance on the ground floor and the garage in the basement is total nonsense... You have to climb stairs anyway, so why outside in the wet??? But surely it's all a matter of opinion.

I think the function of the office and the children's room can be easily swapped temporarily. If you make your office on the upper floor, then you have a larger floor plan upstairs than downstairs. But it would probably be sensible to have the parents close by during the first years of the child's life. Maybe the garage could be incorporated into the house after all? Dining and living: it is always more practical to design the space lengthwise for two areas. Possibly I would put the kitchen on the north side with direct access to the north terrace... I admit: from now on, I would be using Lego bricks to check the room arrangements! Regards Yvonne