Diamonds and jewelry stores, diamonds and baseball parks, those make architectural sense. But what do diamonds have to do with interesting houses? Well, if you can imagine that a diamond shape in plan is just a rectangle turned 45 degrees, you have a simple, dynamic architectural “trick” to make any old design more interesting. Taking a single room such as this one from a rather large Florida house for which I was the architect of record can transform a well planned rectangular house into a dynamic one (to say nothing of our landscape architect!)
In the case of this Sherman Oaks, California residence it became an entire design scheme, with 2 diamonds at opposite ends of the house design representing the Master Suite and the Home Office, and large diamond shape in the middle becoming the Great Room. That, along with connecting corridors from a central entryway, made it such that the Owner cound see virtually his entire house from a central entry point. All of this by the simple strategy of turning three rectangles 45 degrees and connecting them.
The beauty of this design technique is that builders don’t complain that the Owner and Architect have created complicated shapes that cannot be econmically built. A square or rectangle is the same to build, whether its 90 degrees to the rest of the house or 45 degrees and cretes a diamond.
Creative, economical to build, and interesting; diamonds can be a homeowners best firend, too!
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