I’m looking for the common threads
When I look through a client’s Pinterest board, I’m not searching for one house that we can copy.
In fact, copying another facade onto a completely different house rarely works.
Instead, I’m looking for the common threads running through the images.
Are you repeatedly saving houses with dark exteriors? Do you love vertical timber? Is there always natural stone somewhere? Are the rooflines strong and contemporary? Do you gravitate towards warm, earthy materials rather than crisp black and white?
Sometimes clients don’t even realise they’re repeatedly choosing the same things until we look at their inspiration as a whole.
That collection starts to tell me what their personal design language is.
From Pinterest board to actual facade
The project above is a great example.
My clients already had their house designed by a local building designer. They were happy with the overall plans, but they weren’t 100% sure about the exterior and wanted help finessing the facade.
So we started with their inspiration images. There were some very clear themes: dark contemporary finishes, strong architectural forms, vertical timber detailing, black elements and natural texture.
The challenge wasn’t to choose which Pinterest house we liked best. It was to work out how we could take those individual ideas and make them work with the architecture that had already been designed.
A facade shouldn’t be a collection of ideas
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when designing an exterior is trying to include everything you like.
You love stone, so you add stone. You love timber battens, so they go in too. You’ve saved a black house, so perhaps something needs to be black. Then there’s a beautiful garage door you saw, an entrance from another house and a cladding profile from somewhere else.
Before long, the exterior can start to feel like a collection of separate ideas rather than one resolved design.
The designer’s role is to decide what to use, what not to use, where to use it and how much of it is enough.
That’s where proportion, scale, balance, repetition and material placement become so important.
Your inspiration needs to work with your architecture
This is also why two clients could give me very similar Pinterest boards and end up with completely different facade designs.
The inspiration might be the same, but the houses aren’t.
The existing roofline, windows, entry, garage, building proportions and surrounding landscape all influence where and how those ideas can be introduced.
If you’re renovating, there is also the question of what should stay and what is worth changing.
Good facade design isn’t about fighting against the existing architecture to make it resemble an inspiration photo.
It’s about finding a way to translate the feeling and elements you love into something that belongs on your particular home.
The finished facade should still feel like you
I don’t want every house I design to look the same. In fact, I’d be concerned if they did.
My personal style shouldn’t be imposed on every client. My role as a designer is to understand your style, recognise what you’re responding to in your inspiration, and then use my design experience to interpret and refine those ideas.
The result should be a home that feels cohesive and considered – but, most importantly, still feels like yours.
So if you have 100 Pinterest images saved and you’re wondering how on earth you’re supposed to turn them into your home, don’t worry.
You don’t need to find the perfect inspiration image. You just need to understand why you love the ones you’ve already saved.
And sometimes, that’s exactly where you need a designer.
Need help turning your inspiration into your dream home exterior?
If you’re renovating, extending or building a custom new home and you’re struggling to bring all your exterior ideas together, The Facade Design Co. works with homeowners Australia-wide to create a cohesive facade design tailored specifically to their home.
Send through an enquiry and let’s have a look at what you’ve been saving.
