Before The Architect - Amazing Home Plan Design Article - So, You Want An Adaptable House for Your Golden Years?

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Amazing Home Design Plan Article Introduction

This amazing home plan designer designer prefers the term “adaptable" house design golden years' designer house plans.

Still, there’s a forest of nomenclature through which to wend your way, including but likely not limited to –

	Universal design
	ADA standards for accessible design
	Life-cycle housing
	Flex housing
	Lifespan design
	Barrier-free design
	Smart housing
	Renewable home
	Secret accessibility
	Aging in place
	The forever house
	Universal design lite

Whew.

The essence –

Client requests for amazing home design house plans with golden years residents’ physical aging in mind increase steadily, because if they’re not old already, chances are swell that they will be.

Less colorfully –

Modify the conventional habitable structure of designer house plans in recognition of occupants’ diminishing physical function – potential or actual.

Comment: This house designer prefers the descriptive “mature" over “old" for golden years' guys and gals. We’re talking a state of grace, a status and role, an achievement, a sector in the circle of life, and not a social, generational, or pejorative pigeonhole.

Adaptable design house plans are about three golden years groups:

	Those who prepare for a time when they'll be living in the same place long enough to reasonably expect some significant physical diminution.
	Those who already experience that for which the former group is preparing.
	Those who take into their household someone in either of the former two groups.

Before The Architect designs for each of these golden years groups. It’s not tough; it’s thoughtful, mindful, reconsiderate. Good design done well can readily include good adaptable design.

Of very special note to custom house designers specifically in regard to adaptable house design –

Listen closely to clients’ interests and intentions.

Disclosing and discussing physical challenges comes easy to a few and difficult-to-all-but-impossible for more than a few

Approaching opacity, they’ll only be hints –

A function-specific product suggestion

A grateful reply to something you’d do anyway, say, the 5’ diameter open area in a bath

Questioning door width more than once

Absolutely rejecting steps between house and finish grade

Pointed concern about cabinet or countertop height

Wipe out conclusory anticipations, clichés, really –

Not all mature folks walk poorly

There are plenty of other burdens that befall the human condition – its senses, its capacities, its propensities.

You’ll never get it designed all right –

People change

Products proliferate

All eventualities cannot be accounted; however . . .

You will get it designed better if you pay attention to what you're doing

Designing for adaptability trumps remediating for adaptability, stomps it flat

The former conserves money, time, physical disruption, functionality, expectations, stress, sanity

The latter tears it up

Attention to designer house plans for mature residents is organic: the more mature, the more attention.

In my opinion, organic doesn’t mean standardized, straightforward and systematic; it means messy, nonlinear, systemically differentiated as in one size does not fit all.

While circumstances in adaptable house design improve as between thought and practice, disconnects abound.

Such discontinuities are not limited to house designing, let alone for the mature

This house designer reckons it in other realms of design, including but not limited to electrical wiring, lighting design whether for aging eyes or not, home fire safety, foundation insulation, framing and closing in, kitchen design, aspects of bathroom design, ventilation, sterility of custom house design style, and so forth.

Some notions of adaptable house design pervade house designing – the stuff you see and hear about day-to-day – for example, levered door handles, ramps, passage widths (sort of), roll-in showers (so California), and showerbath seats.

Other notions are developing, but still murky in this house designer’s opinion, for example, facets of kitchen design and design more widely focused on us only shuffling stiffly into the Fall and Winter of our years

Still other house designing tasks and techniques are not often if ever addressed

Floors

Doorways passage shall be flush to ½ linear inch saddle, or threshold, including water dams at the foot of garage floors, where the vehicle door seats - means covered porches are happily here to stay

Finish flooring shall be preferably hard – wood, masonry tile, etc – and not soft – most carpet

Unobstructed pathways

Shall be continuous throughout a space (and, of course, between spaces) and

Shall be not less than 32 linear inches wide, not just clearspans at passage doorways

Coefficients of friction

Shall be in the 0.5 range, and not less, and,

Selectively, shall be in the 0.6 range especially on the exterior, as a covered porch deck

Height shall not abruptly vary more than ½ linear inch, as by a rug or flooring transition, not just at thresholds

Cabinetry

Natural reach and not stretched reach shall be emphasized (see Architectural Graphics Standards, 10th Edition , Ramsey/Sleeper in this vein)

Lower storage shall be preferred to higher storage

Countertops may be deepened as an assist in storage space resolution

Drawer storage shall be preferred to door-controlled shelf storage

Shelves shall be preferably open

Shelves shall be preferably sliding

Kitchen storage design metrics shall be adjusted accordingly

A pantry directly accessible from the kitchen shall be included in storage metrics at the rate of 1.5 times capacity from counter level down and 1 times above, adjusted for depth

Countertops

Heights shall be varied to include 30 linear inches above finish floor level, and sited in at least part of major work areas in kitchen and master bath

Bath countertop may be, in part, raised above the conventional 30 linear inches above finish floor level

Design shall include sit-down, open-below counter in work area of both kitchen (preparation sector) and master bath and, preferably, laundry

Both kitchen eat-in and adult bars may be at conventional sit-down heights (so California)

Community and private spaces shall be on the same floor level, while noting that residential elevators are increasingly affordable and minorly space hogish

Comment: Adaptable bathroom design and bathroom construction is presented at length in the author’s Home Design Standards - Home Building Standards

Stairs

Stair treads shall be lighted (low-voltage, as below nosing, along stair stringer casing, at sidewall) or stair treads otherwise distinguished one from another by color or both

Stair risers shall be 6 ½ linear inches approximately, equally ±¼ linear inch – emphatically on the exterior

Stair treads shall be 11 linear inches approximately, equally ± ¼ linear inch – emphatically on the exterior

One stair riser and one stair tread shall sum to 17 ½ linear inches approximately, whether exterior or interior

Stairs wider than 3 linear feet shall have continuous handrails on both sides, whether interior or exterior, including winders

Landings shall be as wide and at least as deep as stair tread width

Electricity

Utility receptacles shall be 15-18 linear inches on-center above finish floor level

Switches shall be 36-40 linear inches on-center above finish floor level

Switches shall be sited within 12 linear inches of a passage and physically unobstructed

Residential lighting design shall be

Layered

Non-glare

Gradually transitioned

Not less than 40 foot candles overall

Not less than 70 foot candles in kitchen, bath, and laundry interiors and at exterior of passages to interior

Not less than 100 foot candles at kitchen, bath, and laundry countertops

Motion sensors shall be your friends, particularly in complex intersections of traffic

Pressure switches shall be your friends, particularly in wall switch access-limited spaces, as in smaller closets

Switches shall be dimmers wherever possible, noting Lutron owns multiple-way switch dimming in this house designer’s opinion [and noting also that the house designer does not fully appreciate rocker switches with the itsy-bitsy rheostatic slide control]

Walls shall be selectively fortified for grab bars whether or not immediately installed

Appliances

Units, notably laundry units, shall be front-loading wherever possible

Units may be set upon pedestals or lowered when wall-hung to increase access by natural reach

Units shall be preferably accessible by drawer below countertop

Units shall be preferably accessible by side-opening door above countertop

Comment: This house designer notes that at the upper end of kitchen appliances, there are adaptable-sensitive design features and increasingly, including but not limited to cushioned closing of heavy oven doors that'd otherwise could take more than you've got to keep it from banging closed, automatic sealing of refrigerator/freezer doors without having to make that for-sure push that you might not always make, sealed rangetop burners for hugely easier cleanup, etc.

	Colors shall be light. Varied. And light.
	Surfaces shall be finished in other than glossy. All surfaces.

Sure, sure. There’s more to this than has met your eyes so far

Nevertheless, there’s enough here to make the point that designing an adaptable house is

Devoutly to be wished at the get-go and not in retrofit

Is a considered collection of materials and methods including

The obvious – stuff everybody in the know knows

The not so obvious – stuff you get from media and

The individuated – stuff that’s really about you

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