With the Covid pandemic and working from home, many people's desire to move to a house "on the ground, with a yard" has grown. As working from home became a widespread practice, those who do it feel they lack interaction and desire a closer connection with nature. This is how they start thinking about living in a house. They buy a piece of land and come to us for a house project.
All well and good... however, ideally, the architect and the client should begin their collaboration before purchasing land. There should be dialogue and conclusions that lead to choosing the most advantageous among the possible land options.
This way, you would avoid purchasing land with disadvantages you're not aware of: with unfavorable cardinal orientations, unfortunate neighbors, limitations imposed by the Urban Planning Certificate incompatible with the design brief, etc.
If you're building a home outside the urban area, you probably want to truly enjoy living with a yard – actually having a yard where there's room for both you and the sun. The sun is very important considering that, for many years now, everything designed and built should comply with the nZEB (nearly Zero Energy Building) standard. Very soon, the ZEB standard will come into effect. And to have an nZEB house, it's extremely important to use the sun to your advantage, to enjoy free light and energy contribution in winter. And with how energy prices are rising, your wallet would be happy if you could take advantage of some savings.
And I intentionally mentioned houses outside the urban area because usually this situation comes with some minuses: greater distances to stores, kindergartens, schools, public transportation, higher transportation costs, etc. Things that can make you dependent on your personal car and bring wasted hours on the road, not spent in the yard you wanted when choosing a house.
Meanwhile, a home in the urban area offers you access to all these services but comes with constraints related to neighbors; maybe it doesn't come with a large yard because land in the city is at steep prices.
If you're moving outside the city for peace and a yard, you probably don't want land where the neighbors have built more and at shorter distances than the ones you must respect. It's possible that your home will always be in the shadow of neighboring buildings, literally.
You also don't want land with limitations imposed by the Urban Planning Certificate that don't allow you to create the "home" you imagine. For example, you want a single-story house for an intimate dialogue with nature, but the Certificate imposes a buildable area that only allows you to build the desired home on 2-3 levels.
Some might say that the limitations could be modified by creating a Zonal Urban Plan (PUZ in Romanian), through which you establish new rules for your land. But doing an architecture project and an urban planning project is a long process, especially in Iași, where it can take years until their approval.
If all these situations could be avoided, why not talk to someone who could help you invest in land, instead of wasting money on land?
