How to Design Flex Rooms for Your Custom Home
May 28, 2019When you get the chance to design and build a custom home, you want to make sure it will fit your lifestyle and serve your needs for years to come. Including a few flex rooms in your custom home design can help make sure you have the flexibility you need to expand, grow, or change a room’s purpose without the need for extensive remodeling. Here’s how to design flex rooms for your custom home:
What is a Flex Room?
A flex room is essentially a room in your home that is designed specifically to be flexible and multi-purpose. It should be able to transform from serving one purpose to another with no or minimal remodeling. In addition to being able to change their purpose or use, flex rooms are oftentimes also serving more than one purpose at the same time.
A flex room or “flex space” can be a singular room in your home, like a bonus room, or it could refer to an entire area of your home that is designed to be multi-purpose. Including these “flex spaces” in your custom home design allows you to further customize your home to your needs as they change over the years. With a flex room, you could move seamlessly from an extra bedroom to a craft room or home office and back with ease as your lifestyle and needs change.
How to Design Flex Rooms for Your Custom Home
As you are thinking about including flex spaces in your custom home design, there are several things to consider to make sure you end up with the flexible space you want and need. Here are some things to consider when designing a flex room for your custom home:
1. Think About How You Might Use a Flex Room
As you jump into the custom home planning and design process, think about how you might want to use a flex room. Will your family be expanding in the coming years? Will your older children be moving out on their own? What are the things for which you want to have dedicated rooms?
Having an idea about how many bedrooms you need, whether some bedrooms need to be flex spaces, and what absolutely needs to have a dedicated space or should not be a flex room will give both you and your custom home designer a good idea about how many flex rooms to include and specific considerations for them. Including flex rooms is a great option for any homeowner, but is also one of the custom home building considerations for growing families.
2. Consider the Placement of the Flex Rooms
Thinking about how you might use flex rooms can also help determine their placement in your custom home design. Oftentimes, flex rooms are on the main floor and are commonly located near the front entryway or near the kitchen. A flex room on the main floor can easily become a home office, children’s playroom, entertainment space, and more. They can also easily transform into an extra bedroom for a multigenerational family.
In addition to the flex room placement on the main floor, you may have other placements, or other flex spaces, to consider. For example, a second-floor bedroom may need to serve another purpose in a few years after the older child living there moves out.
Consider whether a flex room needs to be close to a bathroom as a bedroom should be and whether it should be easily accessible to guests. Also, think about what atmosphere you want for a flex room. Do you want somewhere quiet and private where you can relax? That flex room should be placed away from the high-use rooms and high-activity areas in the home.
3. Go with Sturdy, Versatile Materials and Include Natural Light
Once you have placement and general uses figured out, then you get into more details like general design and decor details. Choosing sturdy, versatile materials for the room, like bamboo flooring and multi-purpose furniture, ensures the room stands up to several different uses over time.
Also, you want to maximize natural light. Not only does this set the room up to meet bedroom standards should you want to use it that way, but it also improves the overall look and feel of the room.
4. Plan Ahead for Combination or Transitional Flex Rooms
Because flex rooms are designed specifically to be able to customize and change to meet evolving needs, they can be designed to be multi-purpose and combine several uses into one room. For example, multi-purpose furniture that can change, expand, and has hidden storage can help a room switch from home office to guest room to craft room depending on what you need that day or even that hour.
Flex rooms can also be designed to transition in a linear fashion. If you know you will be growing your family, you can design a flex room to move from a nursery to a child’s bedroom with ease. Multi-function furniture can help transition the bedroom from an infant’s nursery to a child’s bedroom as they grow. This is one of the kid’s bedroom design ideas. Eventually, they’ll outgrow their current furniture and need an update, but designing a flex room in advance for this transition can make the journey a little smoother.
Flex rooms are consistently one of the popular housing trends. With these tips on how to design flex rooms for your custom home, you can end up with a room that truly serves your needs. There are a lot of details to consider when you design a custom home and it can be overwhelming, especially when you add in multiple flex rooms.
Instead of getting overwhelmed, enlist the help of a custom home builder with an in-house design process. They’ll walk you through each step and handle all the details so your journey stays positive and you can be confident that you’ll end up with a custom home you’ll love.
If you’re ready to bring your dream home to life, contact Custom Home Group at 717-284-4090!