A few tips- Look at waterfront designs for lay-out ideas. We have a similar orientation, and that is how I figured out how to arrange the rooms.

Download a copy of Google Sketch-Up (it's free!), and figure out how to use it. You need to include wall thicknesses to do a proper floorplan, otherwise, it won't work. Interior walls are typically 4-1//2" thick, so it adds up to more than you would think. At least draw in darker ink/pencil. I can barely see your plan.

Other than that, your sketch is missing so many things, it's hard to comment. Where are the closets? Laundry? Are you going to build on a slab, crawlspace, or basement? I know you are just starting with a rough lay-out, but you have to include everything, or you'll have to keep going back to redesign.

I like the small/simple/inexpensive mind-set. That's what we did. I highly recommend the forum at countryplans.com for discussions with like-minded folk. Small homes are harder to design than large ones, because everything has to be carefully planned. You can't just throw square footage at the problems.

If it's in the southern hemisphere and you have a view to the north and a slope to build on, then you are missing a real energy saving opportunity if you don't build into the slope and make use of the lower level...even if you put less frequently used rooms down there...or better yet, put the bedrooms below and the main living above and that way you will maximize the view.

I'd probably want the kitchen on the view/deck side too. Having the kitchen open to the deck is nice for grilling out, bringing food and drinks to an outdoor table, etc.

Thanks for the input so far.

Mushcreek I think your criticisms are fair - I've added some more detail in the original post. Thanks for the tips!

Annie - this is a good idea. I will come up with some plans for this alternative and see what everyone thinks.

chicagoans - I considered this, but I figured if it were a choice between having a kitchen bench with a view, and the dining table / living room couches with a view, I'd go the latter...the cook can stare out the window at some trees :)

In our plan, the back of the house is LR/DR/Kitch. One of the few things my wife requested was a good view out the kitchen window over 'her' sink! Many people like a view from their bedroom, but that wasn't important to us. We just sleep in the BR. We tried to put the closets and bathrooms at the center of the house. The only caveat putting the BR's at the front of the house is that you then have to have a hallway to reach the 'public' rooms from the front entry.

I like the idea of using the lower level as well. We have a walk-out basement to the back, and we could easily double the usable square footage of our house by finishing the basement. Another space waster- Stairs! They are hard to work in to a smaller house as well.

You didn't ask, but here is our plan. It is only one BR, but we could have put two more where the garage is.

continuous glass windows/doors for uninterrupted exposure to the views.

These are not budget items. They also are not very insulating and you will need to consider how they will impact your heating and cooling needs.

Also, where do you plan on putting all your mechanical equipment?

Thanks MushCreek - I'm very glad to have seen your plan..it gives me some great ideas for an alternative layout!

dekeoboe - The temperature is very mild here - it never drops below 15 degrees C (60 F) or above 28 (82 F), so we don't need to worry much about insulation/double glazing/etc. That said, you are right, I expect the glass to be one of the biggest expenses. I haven't priced it yet, so I might have to reduce the quantity of the stuff a little if it turns out to be too expensive.
I plan to build a small shed at a later date to use a workshop/storage place for a small number of tools.

I was looking for a small, efficient 3 bedroom cottage plan and found a few that are posted in this thread.

Small, very efficient cottage plan.

I still haven't built anything, in fact, no good land has come up since we started looking a year ago...and I am an impatient lady!

Even in a warm climate, I would imagine you would need a little room for a well pump, septic pump, hot water heater, and electrical panel. Not to mention laundry machines.

Could the kitchen and study swap places with bedrooms 2 and 3? Then they all get great views, and the bedrooms have the view from their doorways.

Hi all.
So I've taken your suggestions on board and completely redesigned the house. I'm starting to see a lot of advantages in building multi-story and taking advantage of the slope as suggested. I'm yet to cost things out (will have the data to do this very soon) but I'm hoping the savings in roofing materials will make up for the increased costs of including a lower level.

Please critique my new design! I'm not sure whether my room layout makes much sense. Perhaps there are more sensible/efficient ways to lay things out. Help!

I'm not seeing a shower or tub on the main floor.

I assume the stairs are on the lower right?

I don't know what kind of building codes you have, if any. Do some research on designing stairs. It doesn't look like you would have enough room. Typically, you would need a minimum of 14 steps, which is a run of about 12' (365 cm).

In the US, each room has to have 'egress', which means a big enough window to climb out of. Each of the lower level rooms would have to meet that requirement here.

Since part of your lower level would be underground, make sure you put some study into building a dry basement. It would be a waste of time and money to cut corners on waterproofing the basement, only to have it be unusably damp. What kind of climate are you dealing with?

Not sure why you want separate rooms for the toilet and sink, but I'd move the door for the toilet room to the entry hall - that way it isn't as visible from the dining table when the door is open.

lol..that giant washbasin looking thing is actually meant to be a shower!

The washbasin is to be in the toilet, which I've now added. Also shifted the door as suggested (thanks DreamingoftheUp)

I should have mentioned I haven't included any of the windows in this plan. You can assume there will be at least one in each room and a continuous (or almost-continuous) array of windows across the front and sides of the kitchen/dining/living area.

Yes those are the stairs (now labeled!) in the bottom right. They might end up being steeper than normal to fit them however, and this won't breach local regulations.

If you put your bath adjacent to your kitchen, you will have less plumbing to run, which should cost less.

Would it be possible to put the entry over by the stairs? So you don't enter the house between the shower and toilet?

Fair point re the plumbing. I will give that some thought.

Yes there is no reason why the entry cannot be moved, near the stairs or elsewhere. If I did move it to near the stairs - would you rearrange the other rooms ?

About what size house were you considering building? (Try to give it to us in square feet because most of the members of GW are from the U.S. and not terribly comfortable in metric units.)

Given a very sloping lot with wonderful views out the back, I would definitely do a walk-out basement with the two secondary bedroom downstairs. You might aim for arranging the main rooms similarly to the floorplan linked below.

While the linked plan shows a garage and you don't seem to want one, the garage could be easily lopped off leaving a basically rectangular house that would inexpensive to build. Note that the linked design has only two bedrooms but it shows a wet bar AND a rec room in the basement which could easily be replaced by the third bedroom you want.

Rooms that don't need views (laundry room, entry way, pantry, staircase, bathrooms and storage areas are pushed to the front side of the house (on both upper and lower floors). The kitchen, living spaces and bedrooms are all on the back side of the house where they can enjoy the views.

Note however that this is a pretty large house - by what I gather are Australian standards where you haven't bought into the McMansion movement quite so much. (Not counting the garage, this one works out to 254 meters squared.) However the rooms are generously sized and could all easily be cut down by quite a bit. I don't think it would be too terribly difficult to design something with a similar arrangement of the main rooms and keep it in the 175 meters squared range... especially if you left out the rec room and wet bar and moved the laundry to the walk-out basement.

For those Gardenwebbers who don't speak metric, 175 meters squared is about 1900 sq ft.

Here is a link that might be useful: floorplan for inspiration?

Where is the bath in the basement? Or, just one bath for all 3 bedrooms? Bedroom 3 is larger than bedroom 2 but the sq/m in bedroom 3 is a third of bedroom 2?

Welcome, antipodean friend!

For anyone else wondering, in Australia/New Zealand, WCs are typically separated from the bathroom. I've always assumed the reason was most houses only have one bathroom so this means if someone is using one fixture the other is still accessible. I always thought it odd that Americans say "I need to use the bathroom" since that's a different room from the WC. :-)

Yes I'd like just one toilet and one shower for the whole house. No bath tub. Having them in separate rooms reduces the usage bottleneck a little, as caben points out!

In terms of total square footage, I am just trying to keep it to an absolute minimum, whilst retaining 3 bedrooms and a kitchen/living area that isn't too cramped.
So I guess I am trying to keep the house around 1000 square feet (93 square metres) or less (which is the size presently based on the above plan I've drawn). If I can make it work using 700 square feet....even better.

Thanks for the plan bevangel. I've thought about moving the master bedroom to the front but I really don't care for views from the bedroom - for me it is just for sleeping.
I'm tempted to put all three bedrooms down stairs, and move the study up, but I'd like the master up top if possible, simply because down stairs you will have to listen to the creaking wooden floor as people walk around, and I am a very light sleeper!
In light of this, would you change anything about my layout as it is?

One thing I don't like...if the furnishings are drawn to scale...is the fact that there's no room for a conversational cluster in the LR. Typically you want a square that is 12x12 feet up to 16x16 feet or there abouts to place furniture across from each other so people can talk. You don't want to have everyone sitting with their back to the wall overlooking the DR table....

You might also think about how large a dining area you need. We built a window seat into a bay window area in our kitchen/FR to create a breakfast nook which can accommodate 7 comfortably yet takes up very little room. Something like this maybe just to give you the idea:

Spend some time on line looking at "tiny house" plans as they are extremely compact and will give you some ideas of how to combine function and spaces more efficiently. If you want to build small, then efficiency in design is key.

You might also look up Sarah Susanka who has a series of good books on the "not so big house". She goes through a lot of design principles which help make small houses live large.

If you do two stories (walk out basement plus main floor) and have master bedroom up and other two bedrooms down, I would think you would want two bathrooms (or at least two WCs). People sleeping downstairs who wake in the middle of the night needing to use the toilet should not have to climb a set of stairs to get to one. If you want the master upstairs, consider putting the laundry room down next to a downstairs WC and cluster both directly beneath the upstairs bath and WC. That will allow you to cluster the plumbing which helps keep costs down.

With a second WC and the cost of building stairs, it might or might not be more economical to build two stories than to spread the whole house out on a single floor. But, given your sloping property and your desire to maximize views, I'd go with two stories anyway. Having a second WC or even a second full bath won't cost THAT much more if you can cluster the plumbing.

As for critiques of your latest posted plan. I would agree with previous comments that your living room/dining room area won't work very well. With three bedrooms, one assumes that at least occasionally you will have 3 to 6 people staying at the house. The living room would not be at all comfortable for that many people. Plus, do you expect to watch TV, or converse in the living room. No place for a TV and no room to create a conversation area where people sit so that they can look at one another. As designed, you don't really have a LIVING ROOM. You have a dining room with a sofa off to one side.

The trip from the master bedroom to the WC requires you to walk thru your closet (wardrobe), out into the dining area, and then turn back down a hallway. Not a trip I would want to navigate during the middle of the night...especially since I have to admit that I often leave my shoes scattered about in my closet and I'd be tripping over them in the dark. Maybe you're a neat-nick and ALWAYS put shoes away exactly where they belong. But, do you really want the only path to your master bedroom to be thru your closet???

Also, you show no closets except the Master bedroom closet and a very small broom closet. Most of us have tons more stuff that needs to be stored away than will possibly fit into those two small closets. Eg, X-mas decorations, extra blankets, towels, and pillows, off-season clothing, the big bag of dogfood, the vacuum cleaner, the ironing board, board games, umbrellas, recycling bins, etc. With no garage, any of that stuff that you own is going to have to be stored somewhere inside your house. The biggest complaint I hear about new homes when people move in is that they don't have enough storage space...and that is often from folks who have a two or three car garage!.

And, the space you have allotted a staircase isn't nearly long enough. Even in Australia, I suspect there are building codes that restrict just how steep a staircase can be. Here in the U.S, for a house with eight foot (2.44 m) ceilings and 1 ft thick joists between floors, you would need a staircase run about 13 ft long (3.96 m). Anything less will result in a staircase that is too steep to meet code. Plus, even if you're not restricted by a building code, if you make the staircase steeper than about 40 degrees, it is VERY uncomfortable to use and pretty dangerous. Definitely NOT something you want to deal with in the middle of the night when trying to get the the WC!

Suggest you look up the building codes in your jurisdiction and find out exactly what the staircase requirements are. Then you can do a bit of trigonometry to figure out how much linear space you need to devote to your staircase...assuming it is a straight line staircase. (BTW, please don't think that if you design a bent staircase - a U or an L or some other shape) that you can squeeze it into less space. Every bend makes the staircase take up even more room. You need to understand staircase requirements before you begin trying to design two stories and then block out the necessary staircase space first on both floors. Trying to design any two story space without knowing up front how much space must be dedicated to the staircase is an exercise in frustration.

I'm tempted to put all three bedrooms down stairs, and move the study up, but I'd like the master up top if possible, simply because down stairs you will have to listen to the creaking wooden floor as people walk around, and I am a very light sleeper!

How about building it so there are no creaking wooden floors?

Thank you Annie, bevangel and dekeoboe for your candid feedback. I'm taking all that you've said on board and am re doing my designs. I'll certain re work the staircase and the living room area, as I certainly want to facilitate conversation amongst groups of 4+ people. Give me a few days to come up with a new plan.