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Raise Your Home with Style: 5 Fun Designs and Ideas for Raised Houses

Whether you are building a raised home from scratch or modifying your current home, there are a range of styles you can embrace. Keep in mind that a raised home does not need to look utilitarian or boring, and it also doesn't have to be based on the traditional Queenslander, one of the first styles of raised homes in Australia.

Stumped for ideas? To get your creativity flowing, here are five stylistically diverse raised housing ideas and designs to consider:

1. Modern lifted box

Take a style cue from the Sydney Opera house, and imagine a home that complements the water. However, instead of wave shapes, consider a modern, rectangular home that looks reminiscent of a long dock. To lift the home, simple metallic stilts at jaunty angles sit under its base.

2. Antique shutters

If modernity isn't your passion, consider antique embellishments for your raised home. If you already have an old home or if you simply love Victorian, plantation, Queenslander or any other turn of the 20th century styles, lift your home and then add a unique facade of antique shutters around the space under your home.

This covering creates a seamless look with the rest of your home's exterior and almost makes it appear as if the raised area hosts living spaces. If a ten or twenty-year floor occurs, your home should be safely out of the rising water, but any wood elements in the antique shutters may need to be replaced.

3. Classic firehouse style

If neither modern nor antique styles appeal to you, get into the action with a raised house modeled after a classic firehouse. Traditional firehouses and many contemporary ones feature the parking spots on the ground floor of the firehouse and the living area above it.

This option appeals to homeowners for several reasons. By turning the area under your home into a parking garage, you keep the area useful which is much more efficient than having wasted space under your home. Additionally, because you have to raise the home so it is elevated enough to accommodate parking, you actually gain extra respite from flooding because your home is more elevated than it would be if you simply created a metre-high deadspace under your home.

4. Treehouse

Instead of adding parking under your home, take a foray back into childhood with a raised home based on a treehouse. The tree house idea is perfect for homes that already have that log cabin look, or you can easily embrace this idea if you are building a new home in a flood zone with lots of trees.

To create a treehouse look, you can use trees as some of your posts, or you can simply set your raised home in or near a grove of trees. For stylistic consistency, your home can be a log cabin home, or it can take on a clapboard style.

Instead of metal or steel posts, a lifted home modeled after a treehouse looks best with timber stilts, the traditional type of stilts used in house raising.

5. Outdoor living

Instead of foraying back into childhood, create more space for your adult lifestyle by turning the raised area into a living space. There area few ways to achieve this effect. For example, you can raise your home, and underneath it, you can build an expansive deck that gives you a beautiful, shaded outdoor living space.

Alternatively, you can create ground floor indoor areas full of sliding glass doors, concrete floors, stainless steel cupboards and other relatively waterproof elements. In the event that a flood occurs, you may lose soft furnishings in this area, but most of the level is designed to survive the wages of a flood. You can even open your wide patio doors to make it easier for the water to pass through this area.

For more fun ideas on how to raise your home with style, contact a home raising specialist. 


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