

Room size is also self-explanatory, BUT, this section allows us to discuss lifestyle to a degree (Living Room versus Den versus Family Room) and assign priorities to those spaces based on the square footage we assign them. This list helps us walk through all the rooms that will actually be in the house. Clients will frequently provide me with a list of rooms they want, but almost everyone forgets the rooms like a pantry, entry foyer, AV closet, mechanical rooms, generic closets, etc. The objective of this section is to simply identify all the rooms that will be in the house. Pretty self-explanatory, but we aren’t focusing on what we are calling each room. Let’s break down what information is being presented in each column –

This room matrix usually shows up in meeting 2 or 3, a series of programming meetings that looks like this:

This is all the information I need to shine some light on the programming, the estimated square footage of that programming, and an extremely rough estimate on budgeting during one of the first few meetings. This is actually a method that I learned from a firm I worked for a few jobs ago, but I have continued to modify it so that I can have meaningful conversations with clients during the programming and schematic design phases of new projects.Īrchitects love math, right? Maybe, but there’s no denying that you have to know a little bit of math when practicing as an architect and on occasion, you have to make a spreadsheet. I brought this topic up in podcast episode 79: Designing a House because, for every residential project I have ever worked on, there is a road map that is prepared to help explain the rooms that will be incorporated into the project, as well as some sort of projection of how large they will be. Since it has been a while since the last entry in this series, today’s topic is Residential Architecture 101 – Room Matrix.
