Thinking of Adding Fun Custom Features to Your Home? Here are Some Ideas to Get You Started

Here at Springhouse Architects, one of the greatest pleasures are the fun, custom features our clients want to add to their home—whether an art installation (where we commission an artist to create a piece to fit the design of the house) or custom features to the architecture itself. Take a look below at some of our favorites!

Art Installations to Fit Your Custom Home’s Architecture

Custom Artistic Doors

I recently visited Mike Elsass at Front Street Studio in downtown Dayton, Ohio. A current client recommended him to me after having something in mind for her front entry double doors. I knew I wanted these doors to be solid, because we have glass on both sides that are fully transparent, and I wanted them to be ten feet tall (if you've ever come through a ten-foot tall door, it's something special!).

From a technical perspective, it’s difficult to do a wood door that tall, due to warping. You need it to seal it and keep the environment out. Because of this, we quickly realized it needed to be steel instead of wood, so I wanted it to be painted. This client of mine mentioned an artist who does steel painting. Enter: Mike Elsass!

Our job as architects and builders is to make sure the doors seal, how it’s attached, how it’s weather-protected, what type of door it is, and how to install it correctly. Although we’ll work with the artist on a color palette, we really want the artist to have creative license. There's a lot of work and coordination that goes on behind the scenes with these art installations, and we love it all!

Custom Concrete Countertops

Although concrete countertops don’t sound like a huge artist installation, you’d be surprised. These people really are artists! From the way they pour it in, care for it, finish it, glaze it—it's all very custom, and you need to have some direction. You need to collaborate with them and work through all of the details, like weight and thickness, for example. If this is something you’d like to do, we can do it for you with some amazing experts on our side.

Custom Welcome Walls

One of my all-time favorite projects was for an office building—specifically a company that specializes in pumps. As the owner was giving me a tour of their facility, he showed me these round pump impellers. If you’ve seen these before, they come in different sizes, and I instantly fell in love with them.

After asking the owner if we could use them somewhere, he happily obliged. So, we ended up designing a ten-foot welcome wall, which was on a metal grid, with about 50 impellers that started very sparse on the top, getting thicker towards the bottom. In addition, we had a big red sign of their logo on it with a waterfall right under it. It turned out absolutely perfect. This custom installation is so welcoming and really speaks to who this company is, as well as what they do (but in an artistic, creative way!).

Custom Landscaping

We’re also working with a great landscaping architect at the moment. The truth is, when it comes to a custom home, everyone is different with different priorities. Some clients just want something simple with foundational plants—something low-maintenance. This is easy for us and doesn’t have to be a huge part of our design and our involvement. On the other hand, landscaping can be an incredibly important factor for some of our other clients. At this point, I let them know that I’m not a landscape architect, but happen to know an excellent one.

So, we introduce our client to a landscape architect and work together to communicate design intent, like what we envision for the project. We already know the client, and therefore know what they're thinking and where we’re headed from a design perspective. We help communicate this to the landscape architect.

Our clients are always happy when we bring other experts in, because we simply don't act like we know everything! When we can introduce another partner that way, it's a very successful project.

Custom Milling Wood

Another fun project we’re currently working on is milling wood from the client’s custom home site. Effectively milling trees is a very difficult and selective process—so, just like hiring a landscape architect, I bring in some experts to help with milling, too. For one of our projects, we are milling the wood and incorporating it into ten-foot double doors. We also have wood milled for outdoor beadboard ceilings and indoor interior beams. It’s a beautiful personal touch to your home!

Custom Floor Plans

A client of mine wanted to walk in their front door and have it feel like an amphitheater. So, I designed the home where you open this beautiful red pivot front door to an elevated foyer, where you then take two or three steps down into the main living space of the house (luckily, the lot was slightly sloped, so we had some elevation change we could work with). As soon as you walk down, there’s an entire two-story wall of windows right in front of you. The entryway starts out small and cozy, and then opens up to this amazing view!

Hidden Rooms

Ever seen a bookcase that opens up into a hidden room? Hidden offices, rooms and closets are always fun. If you’re building a custom home and want to hide something, let’s do it!

Custom Personal Touches

Lastly, one of my clients wanted their floorplan to be custom, but still like a pretty suburban home—nothing that stands out or screams ‘look at me.’ After touring their existing home, I noticed her husband had collected these amazing antique radios in every room spread throughout the house. She also happened to collect fine China, which were stored in her hutch cabinets. So, we designed the foyer of her custom home with a few architectural recesses for her collection to live in. For her husband’s antique radio collection, we designed a 20-foot, museum-quality display in the entire basement stair wall, which was lit from behind. It was so warm and inviting!

The bottom line? Custom architectural pieces are fun, and very much part of the magic of what we do when creating a home you love. Because of this, it's important to share the things most personal to you, because they truly are a top priority for us. Be sure to define these things upfront with your architect.

Have any fun custom projects you’ve always wanted to do? Head to our Springhouse Collaborative Facebook Group to share!