How we do Floor Plans

A few of you emailed yesterday asking about how we do our floorplans.  We draw them by hand.  When we're surveying a room, we photograph it and measure it.  Everything is measured & noted: windows, ceiling height, baseboards, electrical, etc.  

Back at the office, my design assistant, Meghan, creates a scaled drawing of the room & makes a couple of copies of it.  They're then placed in the client's binder for me to work on.  I'll play around with different furniture arrangements.  Like I mentioned yesterday, some furniture plans are obvious while others have many solutions and can be tricky.

I'm not a big tech-lover and am very visual & tactile, so I prefer to move little furniture pieces around & draw on the empty floorplans myself.   One of my favorite tools is  "The Board."   It's a magnetic furniture plan kit.  I attach the floorplan to a magnetic board and the pieces of furniture are magnetic.  Once I've decided upon a furniture arrangement, I trace around the magnets in pencil or draw in the pieces and it goes back into the binder. 

I create a list of everything on the floorplan that needs to be found for the room.  Once I have the list & the floorplan, I can start specifiying products for the room.  I like to use a mix of new & vintage or antique pieces in most spaces so it's a time-consuming process.  At this point the floorplan is more of a guidline for what we're looking to do, and as I find the right pieces- in showrooms, shops, online, etc-  the exact dimensions are noted & the "messy" pencil floorplan is edited for the final floorplan.

Once I've finalized everything that will go into the room and where it is, Meg draws the final floorplan for the client's presentation.  We give our clients a design folder to keep and everything on the floorplan corresponds with the photos on the design board:

As you've probably noticed, much of this could happen in CAD, but for now it's all done by hand here. There's a certain charm to hand-drawn plans that I love.  I'm not sure we'll ever make the switch but if we do, I know I'll still be printing out the floorplans and using the board and drawing on them myself.  It's just part of how I work.

Anyway, I'd love to hear about your process for furniture plans & let me know if you have any other questions!!



If you'd like help creating a home you absolutely love, contact me about our design services.