When You Can No Longer See Through the House

Before drywall, you could look straight through the Lowder house. Standing in one room, you could see the framing of the next, the doorway beyond it, and the wall past that. Almost nothing stopped your eye.

Then the drywall went up, and those views closed off one by one. Where you could once look between studs, there was now a solid wall. You’d expect that to make the house feel smaller.

Upstairs, the Lowders asked for arched openings. They’d seen them on Pinterest and liked the way they looked. In framing, though, an arch doesn’t look like much: a curved header with bare studs on either side and the next room showing through. In those finished interiors, the solid wall around the arch is what makes the curve stand out.

In these September photographs at Lowder, that surface is in place. The arch frames the window in the room beyond, and the curved ceiling edge above it has a line you can follow. The seams still need finishing and drywall is stacked across the floor, but the shapes are finally there to see.

The Lowders’ arched opening, now set into drywall, frames the window in the next room.

A space is hard to judge with nothing to measure it against, and that’s as true on paper as it is on site. A floor plan shows every room at once, the way open framing does, and gives you dimensions without much sense of how they’ll feel.

That’s why we furnish our design renderings at SDH. A sofa, a dining table, or a bed gives you something familiar to judge a room against. You can see the route through the room and the view from where you expect to sit, and bring better questions to the design conversation. Does this arrangement suit how you live? Is that furniture close to the size of yours? Would you want more space beside the table, or a different view from the sofa?

Walk through the Lowder house after drywall and you can see far less of it than you could during framing. Your view stops at the walls now. You’d expect the house to feel smaller.

Instead, it feels bigger. For the first time, you can see where each room ends—and take in how much space is yours to live in.