The Sketcher Studio
Make a house a home
This is how a Dream-phase napkin starts. The living room is the heart of the house and everything holds onto it; drag rooms around and they stay joined, and only the garage can stand apart. Start from a typical one, one-and-a-half or two story house, or from a sketch of a home the studio has drawn. Any space left between rooms fills in as a hall. Draw an axis to mark a hallway, a sight line or the way you move through the plan. Add a wing, drop in a Jack and Jill, pull the garage up against the mudroom, add a greenhouse or a deck, mark the windows and the front door, then turn the house on the site and watch the sun find your glass. Sizes are rules of thumb, not a design. When it looks like you, send it to the studio and it lands in the order blank with your numbers filled in.
Your main level with its cast shadow, the windows you marked as blue ticks, and the light coming through them in gold. Beneath it, a section through the south glass: how far the sun reaches under the overhang. Both redraw every time you move a room or a window.
Plan north is up on the sheet. Positive turns the house clockwise, the way Stonewall Preserve was turned ten degrees toward the southwest.
Deeper overhangs stop more of the high summer sun and let the low winter sun through. Watch the gold on the floor change.
Central Wisconsin sun and a 10 ft eave. Real numbers come with the site visit.
The tier is how the studio thinks about the drawing effort a house will take. It is not a quote. Every fee is set in conversation, after the site visit.
Typical one, one-and-a-half and two story houses, and sketches of homes the studio has drawn. Loading one replaces what is on the sheet.
Ctrl+C copies the selected rooms, Ctrl+V pastes them beside the house. Drag on the paper to lasso several rooms and move them together. Modules rotate and mirror but never come apart.
Rec room, storage, mechanical, a sauna: pick "Rec · Storage · Other" and name it.
Modules land against the house and stay in one piece. Drag them where they belong; pull a garage tight against the mudroom and the shared wall becomes an interior line.
On a real site the sun and the view rarely agree. That argument is where the design starts.
The address bar carries your plan. Copy it to share or come back later.
Lays your test fit, the sun study and the numbers out on a Usonia House drawing sheet, 11 by 17. The studio receives the same sheet, so the first conversation starts from your drawing.
What This Is
A way to put words and a rough shape to what you want before the first meeting, in the studio's own terms: rooms, adjacencies, levels, view, slope. It makes the first conversation better.
What It Is Not
A design, a floor plan, or a price. Real rooms are shaped by the land, the budget and the way you live. That work happens in Dream and Design, on the site, together.
What Happens Next
Send it and the brief lands in our order blank with your numbers filled in, plus a link back to this exact sketch. We read it, call you back, and the first conversation is free.
Back to The Drafting Room, or read how we work on Working With Us.