Follow the Guide
If you pick a plan out of a magazine (“Looking at Magazine House Plans Is One Place to Start,” Nov. 16) you are recycling someone else’s house and forcing yourself to fit into it. This is a sad squandering of an opportunity that will come only once in most people’s lives, if at all.
When you build a new home, you have a chance to do something special. And today it remains that, as it has been for centuries, the person best qualified to design a building is an architect.
Look at it this way: Building a house and living in it are like planning a trip and then going on it--for years. Wouldn’t you say that it was pretty important, if you knew you’d spend over $100,000 or $200,000 on such a journey, that you carefully plan where you intended to go?
And if this planning required specialized knowledge you didn’t have, wouldn’t you want to get someone who did have it to help you?
A building designed with and for you is a real experience, and an architect serves as a kind of guide. When you embark on a building journey, this is a wise investment.
ERIC L. SEARCY
Los Angeles
The writer is an architect.
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