Designer Brings Dream Homes To Life

[Video Transcription]

Sarah here. We’re going to take a morning Starbucks with Darren Sanger-Smith at Structured Creations a fabulous designer taking an uplift to many old homes. He puts on beautiful faces to homes within the city providing character within character subdivisions. If you’re looking for your next project or how to renovate  your home Darren has great ideas.

I am Darren Singer Smith owner of Structured Creations for a residential design firm, boutique residential design firm and in business for just over 15 years. Thanks for having us in, very cool office right downtown, very your style I love all the accent pieces  we’re very fortunate that so many of our clients have had the pleasure of using  your design services and the incredible things that you make some of these scary houses turn into. Our clients are always impressed at what you come up with,  we really appreciate it.

So give me an idea of some of the problems or some of the neat projects that come into your hands and what you do for our clients  and for you know, other people looking for great design ideas.

One of the things we find is that renovations  up make them bigger they become very costly  because you almost turn the whole house apart right so sometimes it’s  better just to take it right down to the deck. So the big confusion of trying to  get clients to understand cost benefits, right piecing a puzzle back together or just taking apart, building brand-new. So that’s one big puzzle and then the next big step is teaching and educating clients on the level of design and detail that we can get into. Some of the details outstanding.

I  mean I personally love the detail you added to our house and I wouldn’t let  you tear it down. I love the style. So I’m one of those clients but the detail you added really facelifted it basically into this era and it looks incredible, but it didn’t stretch so far to take it out of the design in the  neighborhood. So I love that you look at the surrounding and don’t obviously put  in something doesn’t fit within the community and that’s that’s really important too.

So you know part of that decision on taking ours down and upgrading it is what the environment is, I mean is it sensitive to all those houses around you right? You know it’s not necessary to build the monster home and a house in a neighborhood that’s filled with  beautiful little bungalows so there’s a balance but it is comes down to budgeting. Housing that doesn’t design and budget together – and that’s  why we always recommend that people meet with our professional services to make sure that the budget works that they don’t make a number of mistakes that are gonna be costly and at the end, results are satisfying and that’s the biggest thing with the services that we try and provide.

The level of drawings is the key right? Right. If you’ve got a really really thorough detailed instruction  manual you’re gonna get a very very thorough detailed construction. Perfect. So that’s that’s the key to it so if someone’s looking to find a certain  neighborhood that they must be in and they want a certain house style that they must have this is a good starting point. Correct. Absolutely. Okay great. I appreciate the information. Look forward to our next project!