Designing a Custom Home That You Can Actually Live In

Do you ever scroll through Instagram or Pinterest and think to yourself, “these houses can’t have real people living in them, it’s impossible!”

You might be right… those houses are probably staged, professionally photographed, with lighting perfectly edited in, but it IS possible to have a beautiful design for your own new custom home!

It’s all about the bones of the house. Yes, your husband may leave his coffee cup out on the kitchen island, you may have make-up sitting out on the vanity in a rush to get out the door, but your home can still be beautiful if done right! It’s more about capturing the right scale, the detail hardware on the cabinetry, the beautifully selected slab for the counters, and all the other finishes that make a home beautiful AND livable.

Fresh flowers and a perfectly placed book on the nightstand can make for a pretty picture, but it’s the finishes selected throughout the construction process that truly make for a beautiful home.

Here are 4 things to keep in mind to achieve that beautiful AND livable home!

1. Scale

Many times here in Arizona, we see homes with 20’+ ceiling heights with rooms that are so large that it’s a challenge when it comes time to furnish them without your furniture pieces looking small and out of place…  If you want a livable home it needs to start with scale! The height of the ceilings and the size of the rooms matter! Bigger is not always better. Understand the scale and volume of each space, ask yourself, is it helping or hurting you to achieve the feeling you want. Just because an architect has 20’ listed as the ceiling height doesn’t mean you have to go that tall, you can frame it down to a more scalable height. to make your home look more like a home rather than a museum. See each space in 3D before

you build is key to make sure you’re capturing the feeling you want and that the scale fits that feeling.

2. Do not skimp on flooring!

Flooring is so important. This does not mean your flooring has to break the bank, but it is the very foundation of any interior look. A beautiful wood floor will always show better than a ceramic wood-look-alike floor. Carpet is fine for a tract home, but an area rug laid on a hard flooring surface will always have a more luxurious feel.

3. Get away from the match-matchy mentality

Many builders will have you work with a company that will just stamp out basic designs… one cabinet finish, one wood floor, one look throughout the entire house and it will all look the same. You might think you want that matchy-matchy look, but be more creative! Incorporate multiple cabinetry finishes, more than one countertop material, change up the hood design in a kitchen, add sculpted legs to an island, introduce a completely different panel style and look in the master bath. The options are endless… the point is to

add some creativity and interest to each room to make it your own.

4. It’s all in the details: Cabinetry hardware

Really spend the time to find cabinetry hardware that showcases the overall style of the home but can also act as a piece of jewelry to finish off a kitchen or bathroom. It

can be simple or ornate, whatever your style is… but the scale, finish and design needs to be

intentional. If you are serious about building a custom home, make the details custom to you and who you are as a person.

At Alisha Taylor Interiors, we are hired at the very beginning of the design process when one of our clients embarks on building a custom home. We are on the same same team as the architect and builder to help the client understand the livable aspect of their plans. We guide our clients through each step of the design process, so they can visualize each space in 3D and to see all the finishes and details that go into that space. It’s an honor that we take to heart to work with clients to create that livable AND beautiful home.

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