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"What's your favorite room to design for yourself and why?\n\nThe main living area, because it can be flexible and made to work for your particular living style.\n\nWhat's the most difficult part about designing for yourself? What's the best part?\n\n The most difficult part was not being able to incorporate in such a modest space some of the things I've loved designing for clients. The best part was the freedom to experiment and the fun in going without what most people want, like a dining table inside the house.\n\nDid you use the Internet? What is your favorite online shopping site?\n\nWhen I started designing the house, there was a lot of new information out there about photovoltaics, for which the Internet was invaluable. As for furnishings, with one chair model for the entire interior, furniture Web sites like Cappellini.it were essential for winnowing the candidates. We would have had to visit a lot of showrooms otherwise.\n\nDid you stay within your budget? Or did you have a budget?\n\nThere are always things that happen beyond one's control. The cost of steel, for example, rose 30 percent from design to construction. The budget is extremely important to a client, and as my own client, it was no exception for me.\n\nHow does designing your own home change the way you work with clients?\n\nI felt very much on a parallel track with my residential clients during the design and construction of my own house. Everyone deals with the same issues and decisions, no matter what the scale or scope of the project.\n\nHow did the current economy affect your design choices, or did it?\n\nThe economy wasn't as flat when I started the house, but I designed it to be small and efficient, which is a good thing for any market climate.\n\nDid you incorporate changing technology into your home? If so, what were the challenges and benefits?\n\nI used photovoltaics. The benefits in the desert are obvious. The challenge was finding a place to mount the panels where they would integrate with the overall design of the house.\n\nWere you finally able to try out something your clients were not adventurous enough to allow?\n\nMy clients, understandably, prefer creature comforts\u2014like eating indoors.\n\nDid you arrange your schedule so that you could work exclusively on your home, or did you work on your home between other projects?\n\nThe house was an after-hours project for me that didn't interrupt any of the other work going on in the office. It proceeded at its own pace, independent of everything else.\n\nWhat advice would you give those designing their own home for the first time?\n\nTake your time and resist the temptation to overload the design."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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