By Paul Miller

Interior Designer, IDS Professional Member

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Up until very recently, when I thought about a house with ‘good bones’, I came at it from a place of how the home looked to me. Layouts, moldings, a higher ceiling, and the age of a home are things I always attributed to better bones. As I began planning our ‘A Home With Good Bones’ blog series, I soon realized that in the most literal sense when people talk about good bones, they're talking about construction materials and methods.

So I asked my colleagues Leesa Mayfield of Leesa Mayfield Architecture and David Logan of Vintage Building what the phrase ‘good bones’ meant to them. In this first installation of our ‘A Home With Good Bones’ series we start, like the professional nerds we are, with a conversation on the principals of design. Specifically, scale and proportion.

Photo courtesy of Leesa Mayfield Architecture

A Designer, A Craftsman, And An Architect Walk Into A House

David : I initially thought, of course we're talking materials. It’s quality of materials and how they're put together. Traditionally, that was stone, brick, wood, slate, copper, and clay tile. Natural. But then I started thinking of psychology and why do these rooms that you go in - why do they feel good? And I think it's a whole lot more than that list. It’s proportion. It’s baseboard height, ceiling height - and color.

Paul : Windows!

David : Windows are incredible! You can use all those great materials and put them together well, but in a wrong symmetry. And the buildings don't feel like they have good bones

Paul : It is interesting. Scale and proportion are going to play a huge role in whether you register that you're in the home with good bones.

Leesa : My definition of good bones starts aesthetically as well. Before you even walk in the front door and when you're looking at the elevation of it, you want it to feel proportionally well. If it's an older home, right away the aesthetics are going to tell you if there's a roof leak, or if there's a sagging foundation because you're going to see it in broken windows or damaged plaster or even stains on the wall from water leaks on the outside as much as on the inside.

Those good proportions that I look for mean that somebody took the care to think through the design and the layout of the house. That care just really reflects back into the construction. You're not going to shoddily build a comfortable floor plan.

Those good proportions that I look for mean that somebody took the care to think through the design and the layout of the house. That care just really reflects back into the construction. You're not going to shoddily build a comfortable floor plan.

Paul : Agreed. When you put all this thought into proportion and scale, you're probably looking for a good builder.

The Nest Within The Nest

Paul : And good bones is always something that gets sort of talked about real glibly either by a realtor breezing through a house with a prospective buyer and saying, “Oh, it has good bones”. You hear more about good bones with older homes, but you can also go into a new home that feels very much like it has good bones. I think a lot of it is proportion, myself. I think it's also the comfort of a functional space and how you program the spaces overall. I call it the nest within the nest - there's often this sort of core hub that the family gravitates toward. It's kitchen, family room, porch, and no matter what the scale of the home is, if it gets the proportions of those most used spaces right- you feel like you're in a space with good bones.

David : Rooms have to have a human scale for them to be comfortable. We've worked on some really big houses, but people tend to congregate in the kitchen, or in a smaller room. I'm thinking of one that was a little library. It was a room, half the size of this room - and the rest of the house is huge. But they did not spend time in the huge rooms.

Paul : Having a very small home myself, I know that to be true.

David : I also tell clients if they're thinking about building: don't build so big. Let's focus on the space that you're building. Make it multi purpose and beautiful in scale. Focus on scale and and then we can use tile and copper detailing and plaster and really good quality wood. It lasts forever. Not forever, but 150 years.

We were talking about your question at the job site and one of my guys…immediately went to materials. He even said: plumb, level, and square. As I was driving here I thought, I don't think that's entirely true because I think these old buildings still feel right. These old houses we go in that [are not plumb] anymore; they still feel like they have good bones.

We’ve written before about the beauty and functionality of small spaces on the blog and we were pleased to see the positive reaction to this almost taboo topic for a designer to present. But, when you get down to the root of good design, it’s the scale and proportion and the pleasingness of those things working together that create a home in which you want to spend time.

In the next installation in this series, David, Leesa and I will examine how the use of materials is so important in creating A Home With Good Bones. Until then, send this first part to someone who would love to know more about buying or building a lasting dream house and join the conversation in the comments below.

Edited for length and clarity by Emily Kallick.

Share with SMS.

Share with email.