Design Session One

Kim and I met Wes at the land Saturday afternoon. On the way, we stopped by the Westport Dump for the weekly ritual of recycling and trash drop off. We like this a lot more than having a weekly house pick-up and hope that Kent has a cool dump to go hang out in on Saturday mornings.

We got to the land a little late as we didn't count on the Saturday traffic on Route 7 and will leave more time next week.

The site visit started out with a first. We drove all the way up to the building site on our new almost finished driveway. The only thing left to do on the driveway is to add the two conduits underneath for drainage and eventually put the finished stone on top, which we decided to hold off on until after construction is almost complete.

As Wes starting discussing his ideas, he took out his old Boy Scout compass to show us where the Southern and Northern exposure would be. This is where we hit our first 'glitch' of the day as Kim, thinking he was holding a GPS, asked him for directions to a friends house in Westchester.

Kim and I had sent over a 'Big Decision' document earlier in the week for Wes to look at. This started out as a few bullet points about major decisions (like 'no garage, but a barn' or 'we need a screened in porch to keep from being attacked by bugs' or 'internal bathroom instead of out house') , but ended up as a three or four page detailed epic. We were envisioning Wes with his face in his hands hunched over the email sighing after reading the first page, but instead, he complemented us on the detail and said it it was 'MOST helpful '. Kim and I took his enthusiasm and use of capital letters as a green light to send more of our 'concise challenged' documents in the future.

The challenge of siting the house (above) is that we we want to take advantage of the view (below), but also have to take into account the land on the top of the property sloping down to the left. To do this, Wes has drawn in some retaining walls to integrate the grade change and also make use of the stone we'll most likely get from excavating.

After we left the land, we met Wes down at his office in Kent and went over a lot of material that we have extracted from various books and magazines and a simple sketch that Wes had developed as a way to talk about the rooms, but not meant to be a design document. In showing Wes our material, we basically did a core dump, as we had pictures ranging from Great Rooms and Stonework, which makes sense for this part of the design process, to pictures reflecting way too much detail (like bamboo sinks in the powder room, kitchen cabinets and specific gas ranges with red knobs) which we could have done without at this session. Wes was patient, but needed to get us back on track more than once.

At the end of the session, we agreed that we could meet next Saturday to look at some revised sketches.

As we drove off into the sunset, Kim and I reflected on the day. We're impressed with the way Wes incorporates our ideas into the planning. We did however, agree that we need to be more specific on how we will live in the house (function) and also on the internal and external look and feel of the house (form).