Which way in?

This is a very schematic look at the house that we've been designing. Doing this kind of work in the computer can be tricky because on one had we can be very accurate from a dimensional point of view, which we want to be so that clients can be assured that the design is working, but we don't want to make the building look too real, because if we do then clients might feel that they have to settle for something less than what they want because it seems "done". Hand sketching really captures the schematic feeling of a design, but lacks somewhat in the dimensional accuracy, also, it's not a skill I've mastered in 25 years of being at this (including School). So I've developed an aptitude for being fast and accurate in Revit while also attempting to present things in a way that don't seem too "real" or "finished".

This house is being designed as a destination home for a family with 3 grown kids who will be having children in the next few years and will also be lived in by the client (husband and wife) by themselves part of the time. They are very creative people who love to entertain but seek to do so in a very informal way. They use their current home to host concerts with audiences fo 40-60 people at time. It might not seem like having that many people in your home could be intimate, but when they're all focused on musician performing their art things do feel intimate in a way that seeing a performance at larger venue can't. The struggle they were having when I wrote last was about the balance of the formal and informal in terms of the approach and entrance to the home. They believed strongly that they only wanted one entry door on the house that would serve as their day-to-day entry through their mudroom and also the primary entry during events, this is the door to the left of the house near the garage. The entertainment space is the glassy area to the far right, and so invited guests would have to be brought through the mudroom, past the pantry, through the kitchen and family room before reaching where the concert would be held. The lead architect and I feared that taking people through so many private parts of the home might seem too informal so we told them that we'd work on ways to design two entries that wouldn't be in competition with each other.

That's when I hit on what I thought was a great idea in my last post; bring the porch roof around to the this side of the house and create a secondary, and less-used, entry directly into the conservatory that could also be used by the family for coming and going around the 30-acre site. It serves the function of providing access for guests, but also anchors that end of the house in a very casual way in that its not calling much attention to itself as you approach the house for the first time. I reviewed it with the architect and he liked it quite a bit, and he presented it to her along with an option with two more formal entries.

To my utter shock, when I came back into the office and saw the architect for the first time since the meeting he told me that she went with the option with the more formal double-entries!

Designing a home for someone isn't an easy task, and it's very difficult when you don't actually know the person that you're designing for. You miss the nuance that experience and face-to-face conversations brings without which design requests can seem impulsive and superfluous. I knew that was the case when I was reacting to her decision, so I set to work making the other updates to the design that she requested and started to try to figure out how to make this side of the house work. It's a week later now and, spoiler alert, we still don't have it right.