Your Ultimate Guide to Gathering Inspiration for Your Custom Home: Resources, Tips & Mistakes to Avoid
Thinking of building your very own custom home? Congratulations! Creating a home you’ll love for years to come is both exciting and overwhelming. I mean, where do you even begin?
Luckily, here at Springhouse Architects, we have over 25 years of residential architecture experience and a trusted, detail-oriented team on your side. We’re determined to help relieve your fears and fulfill your vision—whether you work with us one-on-one, join our free Facebook group, or follow along on our blog.
Today, we’ll be discussing the first step of the custom home-building process: Finding inspiration.
Collecting images is often the first thing homeowners do when considering building a new custom home. And why wouldn’t you? There are so many resources out there to help you do it! And the images available to you these days are amazing—I practically drool over the beautiful, sharp photos on Houzz and Pinterest.
There’s no wrong way to collect inspo for your home, but there are some ways to optimize your experience to ensure you get exactly what you want in the end. After all, your custom home is a major investment. So, let’s do things right, shall we?
Before we dive into resources we recommend, here are a few tips to keep in mind, as well as mistakes you’ll want to avoid as you get started on your journey.
4 Essential Tips to Know While You’re Collecting Inspiration for Your Custom Home
Whether you’re style savvy or need a little extra help, here are four things you can do to discover and curate your personal architectural style.
Tip #1: Eliminate Distractions
First things first, set aside all the nitty-gritty details that can stifle your vision. Things like timeline, location, site, geographic climate and budget can all be incredibly distracting when it comes to opening your mind and being creative.
Tip #2: Determine What You Really Love
This is the fun part. At Springhouse, we want you to embrace what makes you happy—what makes you feel relaxed and right at home. These are the things that will inspire your architectural style. Find as many sources of inspiration as you can. Don’t worry about exterior materials or colors matching. Don’t pay attention to functionality or size. Just find examples of what you love.
But how do you know if you really love it? Sometimes we look at art and it’s beautiful, but it’s not necessarily “us.” The key is to look beyond the initial beauty and decide if it evokes positive emotions or not. Does it make you feel comforted and safe, or excited and inspired? These are the kinds of things you want to feel when you come home at the end of the day.
Tip #3: Collect Visual Examples
Whether you like to flip through the pages of a Restoration Hardware catalog, or scroll through images on Pinterest or home design websites like Houzz, be sure to collect pictures of things that make you ooh and ahh from the inside out. No need for physical photos—you can create a digital file, drop them on a thumbdrive, create a Pinterest page, or whatever is easiest for you.
But how many? Collect as many as you want. Lighting, floors, art, chandeliers, exterior photos, ceiling height, built-ins, rustic appeal and anything that shows a living space that sparks joy. If the process is overwhelming, grab five or ten. I’ve helped people determine their style with less. If you are inspired easily, grab dozens.
And don’t get hung up on terms like mid-century, contemporary or craftsmen. I don’t need a label to understand your vision.
Tip #4: Show and Tell
So you’ve collected images that you love, now what? Now we sit down and go through them together. I want to understand why you chose them—how they made you feel. Through a stack of images a personal style will emerge, I promise. It may seem like a mess of photos to you, but to me, it paints a clear picture.
The bottom line? It’s ok to have a clear, defined style. And it’s ok if you don’t! Either way, with a little inspiration and reflection, together, we’ll be able to determine your personal style and begin work on your custom home.
4 Mistakes to Avoid When Finding Inspiration for Your Custom Home
Now that we’ve covered the most basic tips for finding inspiration, let’s move on to common mistakes people make. These four things are what I tell my clients to avoid.
Mistake #1: Only Including Images You Love
While this isn’t a bad way to go about collecting inspiration, it doesn’t give me as much information as if you were to include things that you also hate. True, showing me why you love a master bedroom you’ve saved tells me alot—but showing me another picture of a similar bedroom that you hate because of the ceiling treatment and the busyness of the door placement tells me much more.
Mistake #2: Not Taking Notes
When you’re flipping through photos and something catches your eye, it’s easy to simply clip the photo, then throw it into a pile with the others. Take a few extra moments to note what you like about the photo. It’s hard for me to know that the kitchen photo you included had nothing to do with the cabinets (which you actually hate) but, rather, the light fixtures and the flooring you absolutely love. We need to know the nitty-gritty details of a particular style you’re asking for. Communicating with both pictures and words is the only way for us to create the house you actually want.
Mistake #3: Only Including Photos From One Resource
Most of my clients use Houzz. Many others use Pinterest. Those are absolutely fine and are incredible resources to clip, note and share photos. Please use these! However, keep your eyes open. Perhaps a hotel you’re staying in has a cool hotel bar and you want to remember the stools. Snap a photo! Maybe you’re glancing through a fashion magazine and the color of a sweater would be amazing in the powder bath. Clip it out and save it in a folder! Not everything has to be a house photo. All inspiration doesn’t have to come from the half an hour you have slotted to search for images on the internet.
Mistake #4: Designing Your Entire House Through Photos
Put it out of your mind that you’re going to piece together a full house from photos—that's my job. Don’t eliminate a gorgeous stair photo because your stairs won’t be the centerpiece of your foyer. The way I gather information is not that concrete. It’s more about gathering information. Many things can inform and inspire without being literal.
Where to Find Custom Home Inspiration
Now that we’ve taken the time to go through mistakes and tips—it’s time for resources you might want to use. Here are a few ways to get a great head start on your own project. And remember: you're looking for things you like and things you don't like.
1. In-Person Home Tours
Visiting homes is a great way to get ideas for your own custom project. In fact, many cities host a parade of homes open to the public. The homes are in different neighborhoods, at different price points and represent several different styles of both architecture and life. Make the most of your visit by collecting ideas for your own projects. Research shows that most people go on home tours to get decorating ideas.
These homes are of course beautifully decorated, but if you’re going to the show to scope out ideas for a new custom home, you will need to go deeper. You need to look past the pretty draperies and the cute baby rooms. Many times we fall in love with a design for reasons we don't really understand. It’s probably one of these factors: how the rooms are arranged, ceiling heights and treatments, room sizes and openness. Take your time and think about these things:
Do you want the master bedroom on the first floor?
Should it be next to the kitchen?
How is the laundry situated in relation to the bedrooms?
Where is the staircase placed?
How open is the layout?
Bring a notebook or take notes on your phone—and don’t be afraid to take photos, if you’re allowed.
2. Houzz
Houzz has an endless supply of ideas to browse, whether by department or room. Similar to Pinterest, you’ll find a mix of videos and photos to save. You can save everything you see on Houzz in your ideabooks, including your favorite home design photos, stories, profiles of home service professionals, products, discussions, notes and other details of your home project. You can even control your ideabook’s privacy, sharing and collaboration settings in case you want to share it with your architect, or have your partner add to it!
3. Pinterest
Social media networks and sites like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook are excellent ways to explore ideas from others with your same aesthetic. My ultimate favorite? Pinterest. What I love about Pinterest is that you can now create sub-boards within your main boards. For example, you can create a main board called “Custom Home Inspiration” and then add categories within it, like “Kitchen” or “Bathroom” or “Exteriors.” Even better? You can make notes to yourself within each pin!
4. Catalogs & Magazines
Although the Internet and social media have so much to offer in terms of inspiration, you can never go wrong with an old-fashioned collage! Don’t be afraid to explore magazines like Architectural Digest, Domus, Dwell, or The World of Interiors. The homes you’ll see across these pages are beautiful, and some have even won awards! If they happen to be a physical copy, see if you can purchase it so you can clip out photos you love. Collect them in a folder or glue them to a poster board. Have fun with it!
Have any questions?
Although we covered a lot in this post, you may still have some other questions about how to find inspiration for your custom home. Whether you’re involved in the custom home process now, or even just considering it, join our free Facebook group—we’ll help you answer any questions you might have! Also, feel free to invite anyone that you think would benefit from this collaborative. You’ll not only get advice from me, but from other people who have been through this, too.
Start the process.
When it comes to designing and building a custom home, nothing beats having a trusted, experienced team of architects on your side. Let’s set up a call to meet, discuss your goals, answer your questions, and settle your fears. We can’t wait to meet you!