Most design conversations focus on the obvious decisions: the kitchen, primary suite or the finishes that show up in photos and make people stop scrolling.
Of course those decisions matter. But in our experience, the ones that most determine how a home actually feels to live in are less obvious than that. They're the decisions that don't make it onto the mood board but shape daily experience in ways that are impossible to ignore once you're living with them.
Getting these right is the difference between a home that looks beautiful and one that has been designed intentionally for everyday living.
Here are our top 3 design decisions we see get overlooked and why they deserve more attention than they typically get.
1. Switch and Outlet Placement
Electrical placement is one of those decisions that feels technical rather than design-related, so it often gets less creative attention than it deserves. But the reality is that where switches and outlets land affect how you interact with every room, every day.
Common electrical placement problems we see:
Light switches positioned on the wrong side of a doorway (on the hinge side) rather than where your hand naturally lands as you walk through
Outlets positioned where furniture will sit against the wall, making them inaccessible without moving furniture
Kitchen prep areas without outlets nearby, requiring appliances to be used across the counter from their cord
No outlet on the bedroom side of the bed where it would actually be used for charging
Outdoor entertaining areas without weatherproof outlets, requiring extension cords for every event
Home offices with outlets in the wrong positions for where a desk will actually sit
Outlets placed at furniture height rather than standard floor height in living areas where lamps will be used
USB/USB-C charging outlets integrated into nightstand-height positions in bedrooms
Under-cabinet kitchen outlets that keep appliances accessible without cluttering the backsplash
Dedicated circuits for high-draw appliances positioned at their actual locations
Exterior outlets on every face of the home at entertaining-area locations
This is one of the least expensive decisions to get right during construction and one of the most expensive and disruptive to fix afterward.
2. Acoustic Considerations
Sound travels through a home in predictable ways. It moves through walls, floors, shared ductwork, and the gaps around doors. How rooms are positioned relative to each other, what materials are used, and how walls are constructed all affect acoustic privacy in ways that matter enormously to daily life (especially as open plan living has reduced the natural sound barriers that walls and doors previously provided).
Design decisions that affect acoustic performance:
Room adjacency. Where rooms sit relative to each other determines what sound travels between them. Primary suites adjacent to active family spaces, home offices adjacent to kitchens, guest rooms adjacent to primary bathrooms. These adjacencies have acoustic implications worth considering during layout.
Door quality and placement. Solid core doors are significantly better acoustic barriers than hollow core. Where doors are positioned relative to sound sources affects how much travels through them.
Wall insulation. Standard wall insulation is designed for thermal performance. Acoustic insulation in party walls between bedrooms, between home office and living areas, and around primary bathrooms adds cost but dramatically improves sound privacy. This is easiest and cheapest to address while walls are open during construction.
Flooring choices. Hard flooring (tile, hardwood, luxury vinyl) transmits impact sound between floors more than carpet. In multi-level homes, the flooring choice on upper levels affects what the lower level experiences.
HVAC ductwork. Shared ductwork between rooms creates acoustic pathways. Duct routing and damper placement can manage this but only if it's considered during design.
None of this requires extreme measures. But it does require thinking about sound the same way we think about light: as something that moves through a home in predictable ways that design can either manage or ignore.
3. The Entry Way
The entry to a home is the first thing experienced and the last thing seen. It sets expectations before anything else is encountered and creates the final impression on the way out.
What a considered entry does:
It creates a moment of transition: from outside to inside, from public to private, from the world to home
It establishes the aesthetic character of what follows without revealing it all at once
It provides practical function: somewhere to pause, remove shoes, set things down, orient yourself
It offers enough scale that it doesn't feel like you're squeezing into the home
The Common Thread
What these decisions share is that none of them are primarily about aesthetics. They're about experience: how a home feels to move through, live in, and return to every day.
Intentional design means attending to these decisions with the same care given to the ones that photograph well. It means asking not just "does this look right?" but "does this feel right? Does this work?" It means understanding that the decisions most likely to be overlooked are often the ones most worth getting right.
At Edgehill Homes, intentional design and high-level craft means caring about the decisions that aren't obvious as much as the ones that are. It means asking the questions that don't always come up in design meetings because we've seen what happens when they're left unasked.
If you're planning a custom home or a significant renovation in the South Okanagan and want a team that thinks about all of it, we'd love to have that conversation.
Edgehill Homes has been building custom homes in the Okanagan for over 15 years. We believe every home should tell a story and we're here to help you tell yours.