HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR LAYOUT

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

People often work with an architect early on, but due to budget constraints or time constraints, they don't start looking at the furniture layout often until it's too late. That's where I come in. I can review your layout before the build starts and make changes that make a huge difference. Sometimes something tiny like moving a door 30 centimeters can give you the island of your dreams. Or nudging a partition wall actually means you can get a walk-in dressing room that you can walk into. There have been too many instances where I have been on site and the client is just discovering that they can't fit in the furniture that they want and I'm thinking if I had been here at the start this wouldn't have happened. Sometimes it's just a tiny change that make a huge difference and save massive frustration down the line. So I'm going to show you a few examples where small changes I've made have made a massive impact on the layout of the home. Let's take a look at this project here. The site had an amazing garden and the architect had highlighted that with these two large doors which led your eye all the way down to it as soon as you entered. On first glance, this layout was great. However, when we started fitting in the furniture that they wanted, which was two sofas, one had to go along this wall. And as you can see here, as soon as you put this sofa up against this wall, the entryway is essentially blocked. Now if we move it out it then starts encroaching on the opening that leads through to the dining room so it didn't work. The simple fix was switching the swing of the door. As you can see that simple change means we now don't have to allow for that walk around space of the door and you've got a clear entryway into the living room meaning we could fit the rest of the furniture in nicely while still maintaining the architectural detail that the client loved. This was a quick fix which involved no additional cost. Here's another example from the same project. Unfortunately, due to the initial structure of the building, the room with the best view was the smallest and had the most complicated layout. So the clients wanted me to look at it to see if I could make it work. They ideally wanted the bed to be facing the view. Also, one of the clients was six foot four and was really not looking forward to downsizing to a double bed. So they asked me to just take one final look at it to see if I can make it work. There was no way to make this work without actually making the bedroom bigger so I did that by looking at the entrance. I ate into a spare room that wasn't being used meaning that I could shift back the bedroom entrance giving us the space to redirect the bed to face the view. Now we had to get a little bit creative here so I gave them a pony wall headboard meaning that we could up them to the super king size bed that they wanted that was also facing the view. Now it did mean that there wasn't space for bedside tables but we got around that by building that within the joinery so there was a shelf for storage with sockets and lighting all incorporated within the headboard. So onto a different example, which is another master bedroom. In this case, the actual bedroom was too big. The clients felt there was a lot of wasted space. They were quite tall and they didn't think they can make much use out of this lower head height space under the eaves. They also felt their dressing room was too small. They wanted more of a luxury walk-in wardrobe vibe. So I actually had a look at the overall layout and rejigged everything, giving them the luxury walk-in wardrobe that they wanted and also making use out of that space under the eaves. I switched the bathroom over to the other side of the room. This also meant there was a bit of a cost saving because running services to this side was much easier because the main bathroom was right below it. So if you've got your layout and something feels off, it's not quite what you want, or you just want an extra pair of eyes to run over it and check that your layout is working exactly as it should do for you, then I can help.