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Last time, in part 1, we talked about built-in bookshelves and built-in bed frame. This time, we’ll tackle something different: built-in seating and built-in storage features for your custom home. 

Built-In Seating

This one is a classic when it comes to window seats. Everyone loves a good window seat. But, have you considered built-in seating in other parts of the home?

If your custom home has a large bathroom, you could add built-in bench seating there. That bench could have a soft bench pillow added to it to make it more comfortable. This seating space would make it more comfortable to go about your post-shower or bath routine. It would give you a place to sit while brushing your hair or applying lotion. After a long day at work, sometimes a comfortable place to sit is just what you need.

Even if you don’t have the master suite type bathroom required for a bench, there are other parts of the home perfectly suited to built-in seating. For example, the dining room or breakfast nook! Americans and Canadians alike have made it standard for a dining table to be surrounded by chairs, that’s not the only way. 

If you’ve ever looked at some European cultures, you’ll notice that they’re big fans of the bench! Often, dining rooms will have a large, wooden bench – with a back – up against the back wall. Then, there will be chairs for the walkway-adjacent part of the table. This setup allows you to make better use of a tight space, since a bench doesn’t need room to pull back. Plus, you can use a bench as storage if the seat is liftable.

Built-In Storage

Built-in storage on a large scale is common practice in most places. For example, every home has a closet or three. Most homes have an attic or basement. People love stuff and memories, and so, love storage spaces. However, built-in storage doesn’t have to be an empty room. You can build storage into most facets of your home. In fact, the standard for space usage in most homes is pretty abysmal. If you like efficiency, you’ll love built-in storage features for your custom home.

A great example of max efficiency, built-in storage is the use of stairs as drawers. This is something you’ll see often in tiny home designs – because they don’t have any space to waste. If you like to use as much of your space as possible, you can adopt this concept even in a more spacious home. Stairs can have drawers put into them from the get-go. Even better, you can decide whether you want wide drawers or deep drawers. Wide drawers would open from the front of the stair, while deep drawers would open from the side.

One of the benefits of deep drawers is they can work alongside an understair bookshelf. If the side of your stairway is exposed, the entire space beneath those stairs can be used for storage of one kind of another. Not enough access to the far side of the storage? Well, there’s no need to be able to reach 3 feet back. Simply divide the understair space down the middle and make another built-in bookshelf on the opposite side of the staircase. You may not even know it’s under the stairs if the bookshelf is in an adjacent room!

Custom Homes From Heidan Construction

Getting creative with custom home design is what we do here at Heidan Construction. We’ve been happily designing and building custom homes for many years. If you’re interested in built-in features for your custom home, just give us a call and we can talk home design.

Custom homes come with a lot of room for creativity. But, even when it comes to standard furnishings – seats, shelves, storage – custom homes offer more ways to play. Standard homes have to appeal to standard buyers. Designers and builders have no way of knowing where a potential buyer will want their books displayed. So, they offer blank walls which all have the potential of housing a moveable bookcase. However, there is something really visually compelling about taking everyday home features and just building them into the home. So, here are 3 built-in features that could really enhance the appearance of your custom home.

Built-In Bookshelves

Having your bookshelves built into your walls is great for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it looks great. It looks really nice to have the spines of your books flush with the wall. The shelf being inset allows that. However, a built-in bookshelf is also more stable than a separate one. There’s no tipping hazard and no need to anchor anything to the wall, damaging the plaster.

Additionally, there’s also the fact that a built-in bookshelf can be a lot more creative than a standard bookcase. While there certainly are bookshelves in wacky shapes that can be bought, they’re often extremely expensive and tricky to put together. Plus, if they’re modern, they’re probably made of flimsy parts that are lightweight and don’t anchor well to the floor. That poses a tipping hazard. 

Built-in bookshelves for your custom home offer the chance to be creative without the instability. For example, you could have slanted shelves. If you want something a bit wild, some back and forth slanting shelves could be just the thing. Even better, you can put bookshelves on either side of a built-in entertainment space. Even if you opt for level shelves (Most people would) you can still get interesting by framing in a nice big space for your flat screen and gaming consoles. You could even have some built-in drawers lined up at the bottom of it all. And, if you’re not so much for gaming, use that center space for a fireplace. Everyone loves a fireplace sided by two built-in bookcases!

Built-In Bed Frame

While built-in bookshelves are much more well-known, they’re not the only way to permanently inlay your furniture into your home’s structure. A built-in bed frame is also a fun way to build outside the box. Or, rather, build the box.

If you’re a fan of sleeping nooks, you’ll be a fan of this. Imagine, if you will, a room with two square, walk-in closets – one on either end. Then, nestled between them, is a built-in bed frame. Your bed would be framed in on three sides and open on the face. You could go so far as adding a bay window on the back wall of it, giving you the perfect place to stack your books and a cup of coffee. Under the bed, you could build some deep storage drawers to take advantage of the space to the max.

Keep Reading

Not done investing in built-in features for your custom home? Keep reading with part 2!

If you’re like many people, you grew up hearing that dark colors are bad interior design. Since the turn of the century, homes have just gotten whiter and beiger with time. Contemporary home design of 2023 has hardly any color left in it – at least if you do it like popular media and celebrities think you should. But, there are ways to use dark colors to achieve a luxurious interior that time simply cannot overpower. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Dark Wood and Light Wood

One of the most timeless ways to achieve a luxurious interior that incorporates darkness is by using dark and light wood. 70’s particle-board wood paneling has given wood interiors a bad name. You might not think you like a lot of wood in your interior, but you may be wrong. Getting it to look amazing requires some color balance.

In order to make your interior look timeless and attractive with a lot of wood, use a very dark, desaturated wood, with a very light, desaturated wood. Woods with more color to them can become overwhelming in large amounts. Whether that tint is red or yellow is irrelevant. Desaturated wood, on the other hand, is perfect in large quantities.

Whether you use light or dark wood as the accent is up to preference. One wood should be used for exposed, wooden ceilings – crossbeams included – and flooring. The other should be used for accents, such as furniture. 

Picture dark wood, nearly black, above and below you. Then, in the middle of it all, a light wood table and chairs with a black runner on it. The visual is stunning!

Black and Gold

If you intend to incorporate a lot of black into your home, the most important way to prevent that darkness from swallowing the house is by counteracting it with rich colors or stark white. While nearly and rich color can be paired with black, one of the most classic and timeless colors is gold. A black table with a saturated, gold table runner is a great example. Another is a black-painted wall with golden or brass sconces decorating it. Perhaps, between the sconces, is a painting with a gold or brass frame. This turns the black into a backdrop for contrast instead of a void.

Lighting Is Key

The biggest difference between a somewhat depressing cave of a home and a really classy, elegant home – both full of black – is lighting. If you fill your home with black, or extremely dark colors like blue or red, you need good lighting. A room that’s 90% black or black-adjacent with one little desk lamp is going to feel like a hole in the ground. 

Counteract this with:

• Huge windows, ideally facing north or south to get light the entire day
• Lots of light fixtures, especially where window light doesn’t reach
• Additional lights where needed

Build a Luxury Home

If you’re looking to build a luxury home with a lot of dark colors, the experts on the matter are found at Heidan Construction. Let us know you’re not looking for a sterile, white home and we can certainly be of service.

Having a custom home built means doing everything your way. However, that comes with a lot of choices. From the size of your bathroom to the type of floors you have, you get to choose as much as you want. So, have you considered one of the most important choices you can make? What will your home be made of? Choosing the right material for your custom home can be hard. So, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of each material.

Clay Bricks

Clay bricks are a really classic choice for homes built in North America. They go way back to the very early years of the US and Canada. After all, clay was so abundant, it made perfect sense to use it for all kinds of construction projects. And it made such beautiful, red bricks.

The great thing about clay bricks is that they’re hardy when built into a house. Even today, there are brick houses still standing that were built hundreds of years ago. This reliable material can stand the test of time, and look great while doing it.

Notably, clay bricks are fairly easy to replace. If one cracks or is damaged by external factors, it can be chipped out of its place and a new one can be slipped right back in.

On the less fortunate side of things, clay bricks can’t be insulated internally. Because they’re solid, the only way to insulate a single layer of bricks is to put up a wooden frame inside them. Then, you can put insulation and drywall over that frame. This is very effective. However, it does hide the bricks from the inside. If the appealing part of bricks is the way they look, both inside and outside, you may be able to do a double layer of bricks with insulation between them. However, this will be twice as expensive as one layer. Doing this for one focus wall may be something to consider, but not for the whole house.

Stone

Stone houses, such as those made from stone brick, come with much the same benefits and drawbacks as clay bricks. However, those made from rocks and mortar are a bit different. These types of walls are more prone to breaking over time, or getting water in them that then expands and causes cracks. If relying on stone, opt for bricks, or ensure your raw stone isn’t making up the bulk of your foundation.

Wood

Wood houses are exceedingly common in North America for a few reasons.

1. They’re cheap to make. Wood is abundant in the US and Canada, so it’s much more affordable than something like stone, that must be dug up.
2. Wood houses are easily insulated, as the walls are made up of wooden frame and then covered with other materials. Therefore, the walls are hollow. That makes them easy to fill with insulation.
3. Wood is more flexible than stone, making it better at handling shifting ground and earthquakes, which are more common here than many other parts of the world.

Building Your Custom Home

No matter what material you opt for, if you’re looking to build a custom home, Heidan Construction is here to help. Give us a call if you’d like to set up a consult or have questions you’d like us to answer.