How to future-proof your home design for every family stage
I am about to start designing what I hope will be my forever home with a local architect. However, I have noticed that a couple of my friends who have built houses some time ago find that some of the rooms downstairs don't quite work as well as they used to. They are actually thinking of getting some more work done in their home already. Why is this, and can anything be done to future-proof house designs?Christina Longford
Hi Christina Thanks for this question. Believe it or not, this makes total sense to me. I think it is due to a variety of factors, but they all converge into an overly responsive design at a moment in time. I am going to have to make a few assumptions to carry my theory though but here goes.I am assuming, to begin with, that your friends had young children or toddlers at the time when they began to design their new home. I remember when our first child was born, there is no doubt that our world turned upside down. I had just started my construction business, KMC Homes. We were finding our feet and trying not to make a big mistake that puts you out of business. Ours was the first grandchild on both sides, so there was chaos in all directions. My wife had been working full-time as a primary school teacher (more small children), and I was frazzled from work, so this new chaos, as delightful as it was, turned our world upside down.Like most couples in this situation, our whole world now became our new bundle of joy. Our new lens for looking at everything was that chaos was our new normal (forever) and that we needed to rebuild our lives around it. This was logical and partly true. What wasn’t true, however, was that this would last forever. As we all know, babies grow into toddlers, toddlers grow into primary school children, who eventually morph into teenagers and beyond.When it comes to designing a new home, as we do every day, most new homes are designed when families have young children. I used to think we needed a play area in our design office at KMC so that parents with young children could have them play while we design their homes.Though, for the reasons above, parents will often lead the design brief discussion with ‘we need a playroom off the kitchen’, I normally read this as ‘this is a temporary issue’ and we need to ensure that in 5 years time we have thought about how the primary school aged children will play and indeed where the eventual teenagers will hang out.Another reason this design issue may arise could lay at the hands of the designer. A good architect or engineer should challenge the home-building client. They should use their experience and design flair to guide a young client in the right direction. If a client is looking for a playroom, the architect should set out how the first 10 years of life at home will look and help the young clients see beyond the fog of babies and toddlers into a life of young and developing children. This is the job of a designer. However, this does not always happen. Some designers will just design what they are asked to design, and this is where problems develop.When we designed our first home, back in the Celtic Tiger days (remember that?), we designed an open-plan kitchen. Believe it or not, this was quite a new concept at the time. I had seen it in a few of the new designs we had been working on, so naturally shoe-horned it into our new home. We had one baby and one on the way at the time, and we were in pea-soup baby fog. I did, however, have an intuition that this wouldn’t last forever. Though we clearly needed a playroom or indeed a play area, I felt we needed a lounge area down the road, too. So, we created the lounge area but didn’t buy the L-shaped couch for years. Instead, we had a large soft rug and boxes of soft toys and play mats. This area connected seamlessly with the kitchen so that the babies and toddlers were happy to play away, knowing that Mom was just around the corner. We had years of bliss, and as the youngsters graduated from kindergarten, we were able to purchase the couch and the coffee table so that they could watch Peppa Pig and Balamory in style.Now we have two teenagers who either watch football matches in the sitting room or doom-scroll in the privacy of their bedrooms, so we have moved two steps further again but the reality is that your home needs evolve as your children evolve. This is a crucial factor in the early years of your life at home. Once they flee the nest, you need to consider if a downstairs bedroom would have been a good idea for your elderly parents when they come to stay, or maybe even for you if that niggling right hip doesn’t fix itself soon.Kieran McCarthy is a building engineer and director of KMC Homes bespoke A-rated new home builder, serving Cork and Limerick. He is also a co-presenter of the RTÉ property show Cheap Irish Homes. Check out KMC Homes’ brand new website kmchomes.ie Follow Kieran on Instagram @kierankmc for more home building information, tips and Q&A advice.You can also follow Kieran on the Built Around You Youtube channel and @kierankmc on TikTok
