While building a custom home for one of our clients involves a lot of creative thinking, achieving stunning custom designs requires focusing that creativity, and applying it to concrete problems. The first step in developing any SRI custom home starts with our comprehensive program survey, which is an initiative we’ve created to help gather an in-depth view of how our clients live. Once the information is collected and reviewed, our collaborative design charrette is ready to take action.
So what is a charrette? It’s a sort of creative crash course-meets-brainstorm-meets-hackathon, in which our entire design team travels to our new client’s plot of land for several days. During this time, we get a visceral understanding of the land we’re designing for, establish various creative avenues for further exploration, and ground our new project and client relationship in a solid foundation. To help you understand the importance of collaborative charrettes for custom homes, let’s dive a little deeper into each of these three main benefits.
ALIGNING OUR DESIGNS WITH THE CLIENT’S LOCATION
We know that the key to a custom home is to create a unique space that incorporates not only the client’s lifestyle and family needs, but also the landscape itself. Of all the homes we’ve designed, for over 30+ years, the absolute pinnacles of our practice are those which blend landscape and design to provide transcendent features and aesthetics.
The only way to bring about this transcendence is by rooting our design process in the landscape, by beginning our vision at the site itself, and by absorbing its features with our feet on the ground. One of our driving philosophies is to never force an existing design into a novel project, because nothing special was ever created like this. Instead, we note and nurture the landscape’s characteristics, to design a house that does not, and could not, exist on a different plot.
DEVELOPING INTERNAL CREATIVE SYMBIOSIS
The SRI team is composed of highly skilled, motivated, and imaginative architects, and our collaborative charrettes are where these traits flourish. By unleashing all of this creative energy in a several day brainstorming session, we are able to collectively unlock possibilities that just don’t occur strictly in the office, or when team members are siloed. Once these creative opportunities have been unlocked during our charrette, we are able to immerse ourselves and get back in the studio, where the rewarding process of bringing your vision to life comes into full effect.
