Architectural Styles When Building Your Custom Home
When building a fully custom home, the sky’s the limit as to what type of features, customizations, materials, and new home design you would like to use. One of the options that home buyers forget they have is the exterior and interior architectural style that is available to them when designing the facade and different rooms of the home. Architectural style can truly define the way a home looks and feels both on the outside and the inside. The outside look is more obvious, such as the French and Spanish architecture you see on the many homes and townhomes in the French Quarter. The interior architecture can be more subtle and less well known to other people and even your builder. If you have your heart set on a specific architecture or floorplan layout based on an architectural style, don’t hesitate to let us know during the floorplan design of your custom home.
Several architectural styles are well-defined and easy to recognize and are listed below:
Mediterranean
Just like it sounds, this type of home makes use of exterior spaces in order to soak up the feel of the Mediterranean (or in this case, the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain in the Greater New Orleans Area). These types of floorplans will have extensive verandas, courtyards, patios, sun rooms, or covered screened porches. The exterior finish typically includes plaster or stucco with low slope or flat roofs. Interior details include decorative tile and exposed wood beams.
Southern
In order to compensate for the extreme heat of southern climates, southern architecture emphasizes protecting the exterior of the home with wide covered porches around the entire home, long overhangs, functional shutters, 
covered verandas, elevated, open living spaces and sometimes decorative columns in the front.
Modern
Introduced during the ’50’s and 60’s, modern architecture becomes more simplistic with less ornamental design. Horizontal windows, plain fireplace surround – basically ranch-style homes with low roof lines. However, this simplicity is offset by high-quality material finishes, such as stone, wood flooring, and marble.
Cottages
Just like they sound, cottages are designed to be smaller, lower maintenance homes with incredible use of square footage space. The term cottage brings to mind a cramped, small home with a lower mortgage, but builders have been quite innovative in building cottages with excellent use of space in the floorplan. Built-in window seats and shelving utilize empty walls to create more space for “stuff.” A spacious front porch also adds to the size of a cottage home.
At Ron Lee Homes, we have built numerous styles of architecture and have many different floorplan styles from which to choose. You can bring us your ideas and pictures, and we can design the style of home that you want. Call 985-626-7619 or E-mail Info@RonLeeHomes to make an appointment to create your floorplan design today!
