Manifesting a Dream Home in Scotland
We’re strong believers in manifestation and manifesting our dreams and desires. Part of our process of manifesting is harnessing the power of visualisation by creating a powerful and personal visual word picture woven together by positive emotion and sensory cues.
Buying our own home (no more renting)
One of our biggest goals is to buy our own home. We’ve been renting the majority of our adult lives and are sick and tired of the insecurity of sudden rent increases and being booted out when the owner sells or decides to move into the property themselves. It’s happened all too often.
We are ready to jump off the rental merry-go-round and onto the property ladder. But until we save a mortgage deposit we can only dream, plan and prepare.
Over the coming year, we’re going to research the Scottish property market and find out how it works. We know it’s quite different from the English or Australian property markets, and we have much to learn. Once we’ve saved up a deposit, we’ll be ready to buy a modest two-bedroom home that is perfect for empty nesters.
Dream homes in Australia and Scotland
About 10 years ago, we imagined our Australian Dream Home. Since then, we have relocated to the UK and have recently imagined our Scottish Dream Home.
Both ‘walk-throughs’ are below. Hopefully, they give you some inspiration to imagine your own dream home. Be as imaginative as you want. Who knows, you might win the lottery and have the opportunity to self-build your dream home on your own land.
Australian Dream Home
Serenity
You will find welcome and generosity behind the well-manicured 8-foot-high garden hedges. Past our Japanese-style gardens, enter the warehouse-sized mountain retreat that we call home.
Walk
Walking through the rough-hewn timber doors, you enter the large, uncluttered, multipurpose living space. Timber, treated but raw in appearance, is the main feature; it rises from the polished concrete floor in support columns joining overhead in large exposed beams and stained wood panelled ceiling.
Touch
The furniture is chunky and oversized yet soft and inviting, utilising the natural features of the wood to draw out its appeal.
Smell
The cooking area is separated from the living space by a small low partition counter, in which gleam utilitarian appliances, all faced with chrome and polished steel. The aroma of home-baked bread and biscuits still linger.
Listen
Outside, you can hear the sounds of running water coming from the “River Garden” and the calls and songs of the birds that live in our gardens.
Leading towards the back of the home is a short corridor. You will find a slate-floored bathroom, toilet, laundry, and four decent-sized bedrooms with built-in wardrobes. The exposed wooden theme is tempered here by the need for privacy for our four children, and the walls are lined. However, soft neutral colours maintain the natural appearance.
Relax
Returning to the living space, you see another doorway leading to the side of our home. Through it, you enter a magnificent study/library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a writing desk, and stuffed Indian cotton chaise lounges. Cunningly hidden technology in the form of wireless connected computer workstations blends into the room’s décor, the exposed wood theme. The room has large French windows on the external wall that invites the Zen garden into the room to aid in contemplation and relaxation.
Sanctuary
Entering the living space once more, your eyes come to rest on what you may think is the last feature of our home. Concealed behind a short return is a circular staircase. This leads to the parent’s retreat, our sanctuary.
Our space is upstairs, towards the rear and above the children’s rooms. At the top of the stairs is a lounge area for sitting and relaxing. Bohemian-style furnishings, incense braziers, and candles give a Bedouin feel, and the exposed and raked ceiling gives the impression that you are sitting under the canopy of large trees.
Walking past this, you step through the walk-through wardrobe, which is large enough to accommodate two people getting dressed without getting in each other’s way; you enter the master bedroom. The main feature is the king-size hand-made log and rail bed.
A Bang and Olufsen entertainment centre is strategically placed for optimum viewing and listening pleasure. This entertainment centre is linked to the entire house and pipes music and vision to screens and speakers inset in walls and ceilings in all rooms.
Contemplate
Beyond the bed, your breath is taken away by the magnificent view through the valley to the mountains beyond and the beauty of the Japanese contemplation glade.
Off the master bedroom are a lounge deck with retractable tent-like sides and an awning. Soft natural coloured diaphanous silk hangings waft in the breeze, and the flambeaux and citronella candles provide an atmosphere of peace without troublesome insects. Here you can indulge in sun-baking or stargazing.
Refresh
Above the downstairs wet areas is the ensuite. This bathroom area includes our spa, sauna, and deep Japanese-style bath with twin detachable shower heads. Again, the slate and exposed timber are a feature of this room.
Gaze
All rooms have a view, each with its own setting, designed and nurtured to promote health, wealth and well-being to all who visit and stay with us. Our home is our castle, and we willingly share it with all who call on our hospitality.
Dream Home in Scotland
Approach
Driving through the Scottish Highlands, you weave between forested and cleared landscapes. Rounding a bend in the road, a sign indicates hidden driveways enter the road. Turning up one of these, you pass under new and ancient trees and approach a gate. It is a cast iron gate, simple in appearance. Literally, just a divider to show where our four acres start. Once through the gate, still under cover of trees, you approach a clearing of level ground and get your first glimpse of our home. Our Pyramid Dream Home is capped with a beautiful glass pyramid.
Surprise
At the apex of the roof is a large framework of clear structural glass two meters on a side in the shape of a triangle. This merges into the cladding of silvering larch. The cladding reaches down and out from this triangular shape to ground level on the home’s four corners, implying the shape of a pyramid. The roofline between the pyramid’s corner structure hovers two-and-a-half meters off the ground creating an overhanging eve. Under this eve, you can see a verandah that surrounds the house on all sides. At the front entrance is a shelter that mimics the grand entrance of the Great Pyramid of Giza when it was new. This, too, is clad in larch. The side walls of the entrance rise up from the ground at the same angle as the corners of the house, further defining the pyramid shape.
Entrance
Walking through the entrance, you remove your coat and shoes from the seating provided. Then, crossing the verandah, you enter our home through a double door into an open-plan space with polished concrete floors. This area has a three-meter ceiling to encourage airflow. A staircase sits slightly to the east (right) of a central sunken Zen garden half a meter below the floor and three meters on each side. To the right, along the front wall, is a mud room which itself opens to the verandah so you can store bicycles out of the weather.
Following the flow around the floor’s east side, you enter the kitchen and dining area. Modern industrial appliances, finished in brushed steel, line the east wall and give way to a hob and workspace, a double sink below a window and more countertops. A door to the verandah breaks the run of the counter. There is some under-counter storage; however, the larder is at the far end of the kitchen. Beside the larder are a combined utility room, downstairs shower and powder room. Looking back at the kitchen, the cooking space is supported by a long island and breakfast bar, which separates the kitchen from the central stair and defines the space.
Open Space
The north (rear) of the ground floor is a formal dining area and to the west (left) is an open space that can be transformed with discrete mobile walls to create smaller and more intimate settings in which to relax or entertain. The polished concrete floors are softened here and there, with throw rugs and mats adding to the appeal of the exposed ceiling joists. Our furnishings are bespoke, made with our own hands and match the exposed wooden beams. They reflect our dream and give character to the open space.
Lighting is from the central light well that leads to the glass-roofed apex six meters above you. This is mixed with industrial-style light fittings. A wooden balustrade surrounds the central sunken garden and breaks with a small stair leading to the ground allowing access. The garden contains sand, stone, a small water feature and a potted tree that helps keep the air clean, among other greenery. On all sides of the ground floor are large windows and in the north wall, another large double door, complimenting the front, leads once again onto the verandah. This gives the entire floor 360º views and natural light.
Upper level
Climbing the staircase, you reach a small landing after eight stairs. On the east side of the stair is a floor-to-ceiling balustrade of slatted live-edge timber. On the west is a standard-height live-edge wooden balustrade with a broad top rail so that you can pause on the landing and look down into the Zen garden or up through the structural glass ceiling four and a half meters above you.
Continuing up the stair, you come out onto the upper level. On the north is a pocket sliding door leading to a walk-through wardrobe. To the left is a workspace or home office. Here, the central light well has a standard-height wooden balustrade similar to the staircase, allowing you to look across the full-height walls on the south, east and west sides of the well.
Intrigue
What do the walls conceal, you ask? The ground floor is open plan. So too, is the upper level. The walls are painted white to reflect the light down into the lower level. This expanse is broken with hangings and pictures of our adventures. The walls also add privacy to a snug retreat on the west side beyond the workspace. This snug is furnished in a bohemian style with oversized, overstuffed chairs and throw pillows. A reindeer skin, sustainably sourced, covers a corner of the lounge.
To the south is the master bedroom. A king-sized bed sits across from a large window that welcomes the view of the Scottish Highlands into the room. Another pocket sliding door leads to another walk-through wardrobe on the eastern wall. Between the two wardrobes is the ensuite master bathroom. Here you find a large bathtub beneath a window that draws the Highlands into the room. A large walk-through shower, made for two, with a basin on either side, completes the room.
Like the ground floor, this floor has windows on each wall allowing light in and views in all directions. On the north wall of the bedroom, just before the wardrobe, is a ladder.
Meditation Space
Climbing the ladder from the master bedroom, the ceiling has a trapdoor. Sliding this open reveals a space above the central light well. Climbing through the trapdoor, you are now below the glass apex of the pyramid. A meter-wide border of wood surrounds the central structural glass flooring, which is two meters square. The larch cladding rises to a height of one meter on all sides and provides privacy to anyone using the meditation space at the top of the home.
Looking through the floor of the meditation space, you can see the Zen garden six-and-a-half meters below. A floor mat on the east wall can be rolled across the structural glass floor to ease the mind. The pyramid is made up of triangular sections of glass divided into four smaller triangles for each side, sixteen in total. These are all triple-glazed to ensure the space is well insulated. It is tranquil and energising in the meditation space. A place to recharge and watch the night sky.
Our Hope
We welcome you to our home. We hope your time here refreshes your imagination and recharges you so you can follow your dreams and create your ideal home.
Your Dream Home
If you’ve written about your own dream home and would like to share, please add your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to do a virtual walk-through.
