Why Great Design Starts With a Conversation, Not a Floor Plan
Most people come to a designer with a floor plan already in their head. A room arrangement from a house they toured. A collection of spaces they’ve been assembling for years. They want someone to draw it.
Thirty years in, I still won’t start from someone else’s floor plan. Not a magazine layout, not a plan you found online. Partly because copyright matters. Mostly because those plans weren’t designed around how you live — and that’s the whole point.
That’s not where good design starts.
Good design starts with a conversation about how you live — and that conversation almost always changes the floor plan they came in with.
The Bubble Diagram
Before I draw a single wall, I doodle. Circles and arrows, room relationships mapped loosely on paper, no dimensions, no commitment. It's called a bubble diagram and it looks like nothing — until it starts to reveal something.
The exercise isn't about aesthetics. It's about logic. Where does the kitchen need to be relative to the garage, because that's where groceries come in? Does the primary bedroom need separation from the kids' rooms, or proximity? Where does the mudroom land so it actually intercepts the family before they track through the house? These relationships determine whether a home functions well long before the walls get drawn. Get them wrong in the bubble diagram and you're correcting them in the construction documents — which is a much more expensive conversation.
The Program — Your Room List With Context
From the bubble diagram comes the program: a structured list of every space in the home, sized and described. Not just "three bedrooms" but what those bedrooms need to do. Not just "kitchen" but how the kitchen connects to the outdoor living space, whether it needs an island that seats four, whether the character is open and bright or warm and contained.
The program is where a home gets its personality before it gets its dimensions.
It's also where budget enters the picture. Once every room has an estimated square footage, I can price the program against what construction actually costs. If the total doesn't align with what a client can spend, we adjust the list — right there, before anything gets drawn. A room list is easy to edit. A floor plan you've fallen in love with is not.
That sequencing — program first, design second — is the single biggest thing that separates a smooth design process from one that ends in disappointment.
The Questions That Change Everything
Some of the most impactful design decisions come out of simple questions nobody thinks to ask.
Could the laundry move upstairs, closer to the bedrooms where the dirty clothes actually live? That one change eliminates a daily trip up and down the stairs that most families make without thinking for the life of the house. Could a mudroom solve the chaos that happens every time someone comes through the back door? Are you planning for aging in place — because planning for aging in place now costs almost nothing — waiting until you need it costs a great deal more.
These aren't architectural questions. They're life questions. The answers shape a home that works better on day one and keeps working better for the next twenty years.
What This Means for Stock Plans
Even when someone buys a stock plan rather than hiring for custom design, the programming thinking is already in the work. Every plan in the RED Residential Design portfolio was developed with a specific household narrative in mind — a sense of who lives here, how they use the space, and what the home needs to do for them. That narrative lives in the design decisions: the room relationships, the traffic flow, the way private spaces are separated from social ones.
You may not have had the conversation with me directly. But the conversation happened before the plan was drawn.
And if you want to modify a plan to fit your life more precisely — move a wall, add a room, change a relationship — that's what custom changes are for.
Great homes don't start with square footage. They start with how you live. Every RED plan was designed with that conversation already in it — and custom changes are available when you need the plan to fit your life more precisely.