Split Level Home

One of the most common issues that gets raised is how to design a split level house. Often it's necessary for the house to be split level because of the uneven ground on which the plot sits.

This guide is intended to briefly describe the method to create a split level building on such a plot. It also introduces some of the simple tools and techniques that you will find useful in numerous different creating and designs.

The house we're going to re-create will be something like this:

1) Firstly open the project with the building you wish to add a new split level section to. For this you can either create a new building, use one of your existing buildings or download one of our example projects.

I am going to be using our existing example basic building for this guide. Also, in the illustration and examples above, you will see that I have added a ground contour. I'm not going to detail how this is acheived here (a simple process) as this was added merely to demonstrate the concept. Ground contouring will be covered in another guide shortly.

2) Make sure you are in Construction Mode (F12 toggles between Design mode and Construction mode)

3) Using our example basic building, we can see that we have a simple, traditional house which would fit nicely on a flat plot. For uneven plots, or even to build a section underground we will need to make use of the multiple buildings feature.

4) As mentioned above this guide is written assuming you are using the example basic building as a starting point. If you are creating a design from scratch the process is the same, using the example building simply saves us some time for this guide.

5) You will see from the illustration that in addition to our example house, we now have a small extension to the south side. This extension has a lower floor level than the main house. We will add this extension as a new building.

6) We are now ready to insert our second building. So navigate to Building>New Building and hit OK. You should now be looking at the Floor Properties dialogue box. Now as our extension is lower than the main part of the house, we need to set the floor height for this building. The original building has a 'Height above ground floor level' set to 0. Our extension is lower than this so we need to set this value to a negative. In our example this height is set to -0.8m.

7) We now draw our building in the normal way, with one small difference. At the point on which the two buildings meet (i.e. the south wall of the main house in our example) we do not draw a joining wall on our extension (Building 2). If we used a regular wall, then we will effectively have a double thickness wall where the two parts of the house meet. Whilst this is also generally not the case (there are of course always exceptions when you might want this) you will be limited with options on placing doors etc. in this wall.

8) Therefore we will use the virtual wall type to enable us to close off a room without having a physical wall in place. So select the 'virtual wall' type from the walls flyout menu (it's easy to identify as it is the only one in red). Now use this virtual wall to close off your rooms (i.e. draw the wall adjoining the south wall of the main house. You will know when this is done correctly as your room will automatically be labelled 'Room 1'.

9) You should now have a single storey extension, which is set below the ground level of your first building. You can now of course add additional floors and a roof in the normal way.

10) Opening up the rooms into a single space will depends entirely on the effect you wish to acheive. It is now possible to simply add an adjoining door or is you wish you can use the wall cut out tool (as I have in the example) to create a more open plan effect. The only thing you need to remember to do here is to switch back to building 1 (Building>Current Building>Building 1).

11) Add all your doors, windows to each building as normal but hold in mind that you may need to adjust heights of elements (doors for instance) on the adjoining wall in order that they don't cut overlap the ceiling of building 2. Also you may find that where building 2 is lower in the ground than our original building, the side where our virtual wall is leaves a gap. This can be rectified simply by adding a basement to our original building so that the wall blocks this gap.

You now have the tools to create multiple buildings, virtual walls and split levels. Some of the most powerful tools in 3D Architect to enable you to create extraordinary designs.