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HomesExplorer™ 5-Star Design Award Program for Ottawa New Home Builders

Prospective new home buyers use any number of criteria to analyze the pluses and minuses of every design they view, in the hope of arriving at the right choice for their own particular life-style and budget. But, in the end, they either like a design or they don't.

Professional judgements need to be less personal and more objective than that. And they have to be able to be substantiated by reason instead of defined by emotion.

However, when you have analyzed some three thousand homes in search of the perfect design in each category, consumer benefits and design flaws stand out starkly of their own accord. As they should, if the analyst used all the criteria that follows below.

As we studied the thousands of new home designs currently available in Ottawa, and included within HomeExplorer™, we were able to define more precisely the criteria used in judging which designs stood out in their respective classes, as follows :

• By Comparison
• Quality of Life
• Pure Design
• Utility
• Pride of Possession
• Aesthetics
• Sense of Locality

There are quite possibly a larger number of criteria that could be used, but we chose these according to the Pareto Principle - a method frequently used by quality control experts. It states that "among a series of elements or variables, only a small fraction of them account for most of the effects." It is these particular "elements or variables" - or criteria - that we found most significant.

Since these criteria may not mean what you may think they mean, here are brief definitions :

The human mind makes all judgements by constantly comparing one thing with another, analyzing differences and similarities, categorizing, eliminating, and coming to reasoned conclusions. But only if it is sufficiently disciplined to steer clear of purely subjective reactions. Doing so depends entirely on experience and expertise.

"Would I like to live in it?". This is an easy enough question to ask if you are looking for a new home to buy for yourself, but it's not one that a tract housing builder would ask, when looking for a market of more than one buyer.

This is where a marketing-orientation comes in. In this case it means defining a quality of life for a specific consumer segment of the market. Would they like to live in it?

It isn't easy to define Pure Design, even for experts. It references an entire realm - from the best of, say, European or Islamic architecture, French High Fashion, German Industrial Design, and Japanese classical wood-block art, for example.

Utility is a concept that builders understand well, like placing the dining room close to the kitchen. But a powder room or a laundry, a closet or a furnace may not always be placed in the best location. And sometimes something is overlooked entirely.

Pride of Possession involves such intangibles as kerb-appeal and outlook. It differs from quality of life. You can assess a "life-style" before you buy your new home, whereas to perceive whether you're proud to live in it you have to imagine you've already bought it and wonder if you've made the wrong choice.

Aesthetics is not the same as Pure Design. It's an assessment of the delicate balance between the beauty of a home and its practicality, or the success or failure of the balance between idea and execution.

Finally, "Locality" here doesn't mean what real estate agents talk about when they say "Location."

It's a concept defined by the strategist von Clausewitz, which in this context refers to a skill combining perceptiveness and instant recall derived from ample hands-on experience in the home building industry, as well as aesthetic and practical industrial design knowledge. These bring instantly to mind every design flaw, and each spectacular consumer benefit resulting from an outstanding design.

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