Interesting programme on telly last night, featuring a man who designed a huge house near Bishops Waltham, with the intention of selling it for a million pounds. He did the design himself, as far as I could understand it.
The nice lady on the programme took him and showed him what a million pound house should look like from the outside, but he insisted on sticking to his own design. Once he'd built it, the lady pointed out rather harshly that it "looked like a care home". I noticed myself, this morning as I drove to work, that it vaguely reminded me of the Holiday Inn at Chessington World of Adventure. In other words, not a grand house, more an anonymous set of rooms. The estate agents said the exterior had let it down. The interior was a bit out of proportion too.
As an "architect" of sorts myself, I was pleased to be reminded of the distinction between a builder, who'll take your idea and tell you how to construct it, and an architect, who'll know whether that idea actually works or not. A builder will happily put up a badly-designed house if you pay him to. (Or computer system).
One lesson I think is worth taking from it is that evolution works .... take an existing design that works, and make minor tweaks to it. Don't design from the ground up. He should have copied the house that the lady showed him.
Actually, he did copy an existing design, in a sense . . . . instead of copying an existing million pound house, he copied the styling of a much smaller pseudo-Tudor suburban house and scaled it up by a factor of about 10. That didn't work. Trying to "scale things up" like that is a common mistake in the computer world too.
Also interesting to me, though, was the possibility that the man's attitude, of sticking to his guns, trusting his own judgement, and not listening to nay-sayers about his plans, was the reason why he has nearly a million pounds in his pocket that he can put into building this house. Most of the time, that attitude may have served him very well. As it was, he did still end up making a profit on the whole deal.
