dialect design - modern house plans for a contemporary home

Enjoy viewing our modern house plans. Please take your time to see all our modern house plans. Make sure your view the floor plans and specs on all homes. Each house also has a button (“more”) that will lead your to additional information on each modern house plan.

All our contemporary modern homes are designed and drawn in house. We take great pride in all our contemporary designs.

We hope you find our selection of ultra modern house plans as cool as us. Do not hesitate to give us a call or send us an email for any questions or ideas you might have.

Welcome to Dialect Design’s modern house plans. At Dialect Design we believe that modernity must be more than skin deep. We design with the focus on quality.

When viewing our modern and contemporary home plans look for • flexible zones that adapt to different life styles • semi-translucent walls that transform a garage into a Japanese lantern • sliding partitions • juxtaposing spaces • separate entries and autonomous kitchenettes • roof terraces that offer views of a city skyline or a countryside • spaces that blur the line between the inside to the outside.

If you have the need for specific qualities that you miss in our European style house plans, please visit our “commission a design” page or drop us a line.

Hear what folks are saying about our services for modern house plans:

“Really great web-site!!”

Jacqueline Heer

“I touched on the subject of stock modern house plans. I wanted to throw one more hat into the ring. Dialect Design is an up and coming ... duo based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Both founders John Nourbakhsh and Toby Witte have an international background and an obvious love for modern design.”

Grassrootsmodern

“I am very impressed with the work you are doing... innovative, challenging and inspiring.”

Mike Schulz, Home Improvement Referrals

Dialect’s Musings! To understand our approach to modern house plans, our ideas about a contemporary home and our modern art, please read our featured articles from our rss feed “dialect’s musings ”:

3/13/09: Working On The Next Modern House Plans!

We are currently working on a new concept house to add to our collection of modern house plans. In part due to the economic downturn, but also out of environmental concerns, home owners are slimming down on the size of their homes.

The excess in house construction had also been an excess in constantly increasing square footage. We hear now from our customers and the press that there is an interest in smaller, more efficient and compact home plans. Our modern design approach allows, of course, for us to be playful and innovative about the size of a house. It is not a question of giving up certain amenities or luxuries. It is a question of how to meet these expectations.

We have found that most home plans that are geared to meet a more, so called, traditional market are bound by a set of formulas that are rather restrictive.

The European style modernity and innovative exploration found in current American and Australian architecture gives us the freedom to design towards our customers’ specific needs and ideas. In the selection of our modern house plans we try to cut down on square footage, building cost and the future fees of energy bills, while being expensive in the quality of the spaces, the engagement in your daily life, and contemporary patterns of living. The current set of modern house plans we are developing is meeting all these concerns even more stringently.

One of the big questions we are tackling is how to meet a variety of contemporary living arrangements with a smaller house. That means can we offer modern house that meets a two person couple, a single parent with two kids, a small family with a live-in grandparent, as single professional subleasing a full unit, stay at home professional parents with a set of kids, and all the other current ways of living together? Yet, the proposed house plans would have to be cost effective to construct and end with a low energy house. And in addition it has to be cool and sexy to meet the current desires and whishes of living.

We’ll keep you updated as we move forward. When it’s all worked out we will add it to our selection of modern house plans.

Please browse our selection: modern house plans T.1 , modern house plans K.1 , modern house plans B.1, modern house plans P.1, your modern house plans

3/18/09: The Art of Modern House Plans!

We draw great inspiration in the design of our modern house plans from our involvement in contemporary art.

Too often architecture and the building industry find themselves reduced to a process of piling up materials and mitigating restrictions and building codes. We believe, however, that we are involved in the creation of spaces and built environments that bring riches to your daily life. We spend the majority of our lives within our manmade surroundings. And we draw great strength from our private and public settings. We need to pay great attention to the quality of those spaces. A quality that deals with warmth, cozy protection, with a sense of timeless comfort, and with the yearning for memories lived. It is a quality that comes from meeting habits and the engagements of life. It works with your senses; tactile, visual and sound.

To meet these strong needs we work on and stay innovative in the selection of materials, their textures and sensual strength. We incorporate the play of light into our modern house plans, to let light and shadows create patterns, where warmth is needed, and keep direct sunlight out, where glare needs to be reduced. We take a close look at circulation patterns and proximity of certain areas of use. We fine-tune spatial qualities, the proportions of spaces. We incorporate structural elements of the building into these considerations to have exposed beams or posts help shape these environments appropriately.

To bring these qualities to our modern house plans, we consider our work that of an art. We have to start with a specific set of skills and then use it to create a lived piece of art that transcends practicalities and reaches a very real felt importance in the lives of our customers. To do so we learn from the great contemporary art that surrounds us and we are involved with. Surprisingly, the professional degrees of architecture in the US are called Bachelor of Art in Architecture. All licensed architect have acquired that degree. And yet, the art seems to be dropped too often and too quickly in the work and endeavors we found ourselves in.

We certainly hope we serve you well with our approach and are creating true pieces of art in the selection of modern house plans we offer. Have a look!

Please browse our selection: modern house plans T.1 , modern house plans K.1 , modern house plans B.1, modern house plans P.1, your modern house plans

4/30/09: Original Designs!

We spent some time with renowned writer, actor, force-of-live, performer John W. Love Jr. in our studio. He took us deep into the world of theater, including the dynamics between playwright, producer, director, and actors.

Part of our discussion hovered around the origin of a specific piece of creative art; may it be a play or a beautiful well designed modern building. The parallel, of course became fascinating, as any modern house would have a designer, a builder and a developer and/or home owner. In either case, play or architecture, all parties are involved bringing richness to the work at hand. They shape and are integral in the final full experience to be had.

With the play, however, we named the play write the originator of the piece. The playwright conceives of a lived experience, to which all other participants bring their talent and skills. They bring it to life on a stage. There is an intent and an original thought, vision, questioning and creation that are all asked to be understood and developed to its full intended being.

Well, this morning we saw an article in the Charlotte Observer about the present state of architects in this city, emblematic we are sure, for the entire nation. The unfortunate aftertaste, reading the article, was that of a dis-connect of the architect from the art of their craft. The short pieces of interviews read as sad reactionary attitudes towards the direction given by the Developers or the Investors; the architect rendered voiceless as the mere technician, the executer of only monetary interests. The playwright, we are sure, often writes a play, without maybe a specific venue or production in mind. Even though the reverse happens, too.

The architect, of course, is being called in when somebody with the finances says “go” first. But what then? Does that make the faceless number-driven developer the originator? Or is it still the artist, the playwright, the designer? And we mean the art of a building, the true lived experience, the life it breathes.

There are creative developer-designer-builder teams or entities out there that might be all in one. And we enjoy working with creative minds and give great credit and much thanks to all of our friends who have brought challenging propositions to us. Once we get going, though, we tend to create a piece of art that wasn’t there before. We induce our own seedling into the process that grows into its own artistic experience, into a building that will give you goose bumps when you will finally enter it in person (good goose bumps, of course ;) ). In that sense we think of ourselves as the ones that create as artist the lived experience of a modern house. It is not that we don’t execute our clients’ wishes or needs and we also do not disregard economic parameters. But we take all the pieces, hundreds of them, and shape them into a true piece of art.

We live through a creative process that dreams up, develops, and truly lives the experiences to be had in a specific built environment, a specific contemporary home. When we got to build it ourselves, we got to direct and act a little. And when we developed ourselves, we got to produce a little. But, we think of ourselves as play writes maybe first and foremost. It occurred to us that offering our modern house plans online, makes us then truly the play write. The original design lies in our fingertips. We create these modern house plans as creative expressions as a result of our artistic needs.

The clarity in this realization meant for us that you are sure going to see designs coming up that are much more free in nature; designs born out of our expressive need maybe, more so than pragmatic needs. They will be buildable and they will be beautiful, and they might be for just the few of you, who want just that one special, crazy, cool modern house design that will make you live a life you always wanted and could never dream of.

In any case, though, it means for us that there is going to be much more fun yet to be had for us and for you. To have this kind of art developed between you and us, please continue to enrich us with your valued comments, ideas and wishes at http://www.dialectdesign.com.

Please browse our selection: modern house plans T.1 , modern house plans K.1 , modern house plans B.1, modern house plans P.1, your modern house plans