Great design is defined as the ability to translate client ideas on how they want to live into spaces they will be passionate about.

When you look at a Wormald home, you know something is different, though you may not be able to quantify it in words. When you walk through the home, you want to stay, “it just feels right”. You want to explore what lies beyond the winding stairs that beckon you forward, you find yourself soaking in a particular mood in yet another room.

We’ll let you in on a couple of our secrets.

The first is what we call “House Flow”, a way of understanding home design, looking at what creates intimate spaces and “wow” in a home. We live in a market bogged down with an intense focus on room count and total square footage. However, these are elementary and shallow indicators of a home’s ultimate architectural design value. In fact, great design is far more complex. We believe it is an experience created by several well-thought out decisions in the design process. A great home has several key ingredients that help to define it experientially and include such things as:

1. Strong First Impressions. A strong sense of arrival upon entering the residence through such things as how the stairs present themselves into the Foyer space, adding volume to Foyer spaces, bringing light into the space through an eyebrow dormer window, or adding intricate textured glass designs to front doors and sidelights,
2. Focal points that draw your eye through the house such as a stone-faced fireplace drawing your eye into the next room,
3. Strategic Transitions from room to room through archways, vestibules, and corridors which achieve the compression into intimate spaces such as a hallway space, and expansion into the grandeur and volume of a larger room which Frank Lloyd Wright loved to use in his homes to enhance the experience of living in the home; these spaces also provide needed transitions from more public areas to more private areas such as from a Great Room, through a private Vestibule, to an Owner’s Suite,
4. Dramatic Main Rooms that define a home’s character and that are places people tend to spend the most time. These rooms are critical to get right and include rooms such as a Gourmet Kitchen, a Great Room, or an Owner’s Suite,
5. the integration of one-of-a-kind Signature Spaces which take the home beyond the norm and set the home apart such as Wine Cellars, a stadium seating Home Theater, an Outdoor Living Room / Screened Porch with a stacked stone fireplace, a Spa Retreat, a Pub, and other fun spaces which enhance life in the home, and
6. Vary the experience through Unusual Details. A miniature window on a stairwell, a bridge crossing through a two- story Foyer, sloped ceilings, window seats, a curved balcony, unusual trim designs, decorative iron balusters, art wall niches, elliptical interior transom windows, a domed Center Hall, a coffered Library ceiling, a curved wall, a signature built-in display cabinet, and so on.

All these things come together to keep you guessing what delight lies around the corner. They add interest and when blended together create a space you can be passionate about and what we call the beauty and intrigue of your homes’ House Flow.

A second secret is to look at the roof. The design of the roof is actually what often gives a home the character and charm that we all love. Wormald loves using varied roof forms, varied roof pitches, varied roof lines and heights, breaking the roof line with windows, adding interesting mouldings, and putting in varied dormer windows wherever the architectural theme allows it. Whereas most builders may have one or two truss profiles in their houses, it’s not unusual to see as many as forty in a Wormald home.