Dear Designer, We are planning for our early retirement and are creating a small farm in TaChong in north east Thailand to keep us busy. Initial work has been to create a water landscape from rice fields and we are now building a garage with granny flat to stay in when the main house is built. (We expect to sublet this house or run a small business from it once we retire). We now need help with design ideas for the main house. Design that uses the spot we have created for the main building in the water landscape One floor – we want to avoid stairs when we get older. As the view from a second floor would be good we have considered having an upstairs patio, accessed from the outside, if that can be worked into the design. This can potentially be combined with the guest room being on a second floor over the garage. Large master bedroom with large ensuite. Lots of storage – walk in closet. Smaller guest bedroom/office Large indoor and outdoor kitchen – close together. We are thinking of linking counter space from both kitchens with a window. We will likely park outside, under roof to protect from sun, most of the time. Good if the kitchen is close to where we park the car. Large living space outdoors Separate guest suite Separate one car garage Storage Pool + approx. 8x4 m or larger if it can be worked into the design. Doesn’t have to be a rectangular shape so could be made to fit in with the landscape. Note that a lot of the buildings we have seen here use a rule of thumb and beams have a max span of 4m. We think it is a good idea to work this into the design with the exception of avoiding a pillar in the middle of the living area. A few things to note: - We will add another 1m of soil on top of the area of the main house. This will include filling in the area with water that can be seen in the lower left of my Visio draft. - The driveway will be widened 1-2m on the left side - The land for the main house is approx. 40m wide and 30m deep - We will be using the same 20cm wide blocks we are using for the garage and we expect pillars to be 20x20cm - We would like to get the foundation started in the next couple of weeks so we would like to move fast with a decision on the general layout. The following documents have been provided for your reference: 1. The land with the water landscape 2. Visio unfinished draft. 3. Design of the garage (we expect to use the same roofing and colour schemes) 4. Status of garage build 5. Location - Ta Chong, Buriram – Google Mapshttps://www.google.co.th/maps/@14.4215411,102.9499317,3a,75y,23.86h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s9GY0YSfAqOd8-YCo7PanSQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D9GY0YSfAqOd8-YCo7PanSQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D23.186508%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656?hl=sv Note that the satellite image is showing a dam on that spot but not sure what happened with Google Maps. This request is for the design of the two integrated buildings and we expect 3-5 rough drafts and once we decided on a design we like it will require quite a few iterations. Layout can be provided either in Visio of SketchUp LayOut. The final delivery should be a SketchUp model and SketchUp LayOut 2d drawing. The design needs to be structurally sound but the drawings for building permit will be created in AutoCad by a local architect. Happy to reply to any questions you may have and provide further information. Looking forward to your response. As a side note I am Swedish/Australian, and my wife is Thai. Best Regards, Lennart & Noi 20221128 My wife just came with a good idea in having the upstairs patio on top of the outside area between the garage and main building. Something to consider for the two story option. Added an alternate very rough draft design on this option. Needs to figure out placement of the stairs also keeping in mind that the second story will be 3.5-4m over base level.