The Small Details That Make an Unbuilt House Feel Real

This house doesn't exist yet. There's no brickwork, no timber gate, no hydrangeas by the drive. But look at the images for long enough and you can almost hear someone pulling up outside.

That's the strange job of a CGI. When someone is thinking about buying off plan, they can't walk round the site, touch the render or see how the light falls at four in the afternoon. What they have is a picture, and that picture has to do a lot of work.

Starting at the front door

The arched porch is the first thing your eye lands on, and it's one of my favourite parts of this house. The grey brick arch, with its pale mortar lines, picks up the colour of the roof and the front door. The same brickwork comes back over the windows and again underneath them as cills. It's a small repeat, but it ties the whole front of the house together.

The dark grey door with its glazed side panel gives you a hint of the hallway before you've even stepped inside.

Texture does the heavy lifting

Zoom in on the walls and you'll see the render isn't flat white. It has a slightly rough, hand-finished texture, with soft shadows under the gutter and around the window reveals. That's usually what separates a picture that feels believable from one that feels like a diagram. Real walls are never perfectly clean or perfectly even, so a CGI shouldn't be either.

The bits around the house

The closeboard gate is a good example. The boards sit slightly differently, the knots are all in different places and the sun picks out the grain. Next to it, the block paving has a few fallen leaves scattered across it, and the planting (white hydrangeas, pink flowering shrubs, a bit of lavender) softens the edges so the house feels settled rather than just dropped into a field.

None of that is in the architect's drawings, strictly speaking. It's what makes the picture feel like a place.

Why bother with all of it?

Because buying a home off plan takes imagination, and the easier you make that for people, the better. They don't need to be told how nice the house is. They just need to be able to picture themselves walking up the path with the shopping and reaching for that front door.

So here's my question: which detail would you notice first? I'm guessing the porch, but I'd love to know.