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Hi RePete, another app for drafting is Home Sweet Home which is free. My experience has been that some of the really good architects are happy to share their ideas when they visit as they enjoy the creative process so much. Eg Williams Burton met with us years ago (we are still figuring out what to do!) - and I was very impressed. We didn't use them as they are very fastidious so their builds take a long time and we can't cope with that but they do some amazing work on character homes in particular and although people think of them as only doing very expensive jobs, I am aware that they have also done some cheaper jobs where the project has got their interest. You could try talking to them and a few others from that "tier". I can't remember if we paid for the initial meeting, but if we did it was only a very small amount. I would seek as many views as possible (including here), keep trawling the net and pinterest as well as Houzz, look at lots of magazines etc, go to every open home that is vaguely like your style and ask the real estate agent who designed/built it... (hmmmm this is why we haven't started building yet after 8 years...) As Ok says, probably the only person that can determine what accommodation is required is you, so make that thought process a parallel one to looking at pictures. Good luck.

No, architect's don't just do "big budget"....but custom design just can't compete with the cost efficiencies that volume housing companies can achieve. $400K is super tight for a custom designed home no matter how small it is. I could give you a pretty accurate trade breakdown on a new house scenario (without designing anything) and dealing with say a minimised scale/size) and when you stack up the costs starting with preliminaries and then considering if you are an acreage situation considering services trenching in, site establishment flag falls, larger scale external aspects, even done conservatively you'll be more realistically/likely talking $700K ballpark minimum as a start and will go up from there depending upon certain decisions & detail........You need to be thinking $3500/m2 as a minimum for a custom scenario so unless the house is super small/apartment/unit sized ( which doesn't make sense on an acreage scenario) you'll have your budget challenged.........I crunch these numbers on a daily basis and I'm not exaggerating or being loose - but hope this helps give you a gauge for your decision making moving forward......Whilst I am a passionate advocate for architecture & quality design, I'm also super conscious of the realistic of what it practically costs to achieve the built results and you need a certain amount to achieve a certain scale of building when they are "one-offs" with minimal inherent economies of scale........... Possibly in your case you may be best to pursue a new home at an under $400K budget with a smaller design & construct packaged builder who kind of does a certain thing regularly so you can possibly achieve some system cost efficiencies but also get some customisation/flexibility....steer clear of the bigger companies because they as you say will be inflexible........ best of luck! Cheers PD

There's a move away from gas to the extent that new suburbs where I live are not even being provided with gas mains. Evap cooling when we researched some time back required some windows open and I remember people complaining about that during last summer's smoke. Regardless of which systems you choose, I could not agree more with oklouise, start with good solar passive design and insulation, that's the most efficient way of reducing the reliance on and cost of heating and cooling systems.