In this episode, Sarah and Bruce welcome Chris Brown, award-winning principal of b Architecture Studio and author of “Our Guide to Your Getaway Home.” Chris shares with Sarah and Bruce the steps in the “self discovery” process that is critical if you’re considering buying or building a second home. Everything from how to design the space based on typography of a location to the number of people – and pets – that might be regular visitors, are discussed in detail. If you’re contemplating a getaway escape, you won’t want to miss this episode!
I really want to thank you for putting this brochure together, what made you do it?
Okay, we will start right off the bat! This was really part of b architecture, myself, my staff, finding what we are really passionate about. With the clients we work with and our projects, and getaway homes kept going to the top of the list. It was the most fun projects, the best clients, and frankly the most profitable. So how do we help people get to where we think they want to go? And this guidebook is that start. The fun for us was creating it and really making it quite personal and that’s what our custom home designs are about, but this you get a bit of my life in here. You see our old dog Royce, he’s still on the website in Memorium, we miss him, but his adventurous spirit, it lives in all of us.
Did customers come to you and say, did you see patterns when they came with things they needed help with getting organized in terms of their thinking around a getaway house or did they come to you and all say we are about to buy one we are thinking of buying one. What was the motivation?
I think we were seeing all of that Sarah. The clients were coming and sometimes their thoughts get too into the future, they are too forward. They are down to how many bathrooms and how they connect to the bedrooms and we want to bring them back a setp. And part of what the guidebook does, if you don’t know where you’re going, it helps you get there. If you have gotten there, these checklists that are in there hopefully help confirm you are in the right place.
So if someone comes in and say “I’m thinking of getting a vacation home” what should I be thinking about before I decide to buy? Do you advise them on that?
We can and these seem like easy questions but they really solidify where you are going. Because think about it – getaway home – How often are you going there? Are you the weekend warrior and it’s every weekend in the winter? That’s me skiing. Is it a place where work now allows you to work there maybe for a month? So we start with where is the radius, where is the circumference of where you are traveling, and how? Are you just getting in a car, loading it up for the weekend, and going? Or do you have to get on a ferry? Do you have to fly? If it’s in the winter, do you have snow tires? Not only four-wheel drive but snow tires. And we will help assess the site before we even get to the site. Again, if you’re going down to Cape Cod a great time to visit is right after the rain. Because what you think is at a high elevation you may be staying put for a while because down the hill is impassible because of the rain storm. So we always check for, we are getting into specifics of a flood plain, but even if the home is not are you okay if you need to run to the storm or an emergency?… So before we even get to the site we are making sure that this place of relaxation of recharge of where you want to be doesn’t give you the white knuckle ride either coming or going.