The Design of a New Tourist House in Kwau village of Arfak mountains

I am now in the process of designing a simple tourist house for Kwau village. This current tourist house is far from the main road making it very difficult for elderly travelers to reach it. As a solution, I and the villagers in the village are now trying to build another guesthouse for tourists which is closer to the road.
As a naval architect, I am more familiar with Delftship. When I was asked by Samuel Mandacan and Hans Mandacan, two leaders of Kwau village, to help them design the guesthouse, I had to start learning Google Sketchup. As a matter of fact there is another BIM software that I was familiar with. It was Archicad.

Although Archicad is more suitable for home design, I choose Google Sketchup because it is lighter. I am now trying to master it. The following is the unfinished 3D presentation of the tourist house. It will be constructed with wood and concrete materials. This timber frame house will be constructed at a slope of Kwau village area. The lower part will be made of concrete whereas the upper part - the wooden planks and blocks. In Indonesia, this type of construction is called rumah semi permanen (semi permanent house). It is not fully a wooden house or concrete house.

I am thinking of designing several other types with different floor plans. However because of budget constraints, I cannot dream a tourist house that looks like a luxurious resort in the mountains. In this design, the kitchen and toilet will be separated from the main building. So, the right term for this house should be a garden house.
Tourists will stay for 3 to 14 days in this simple guesthouse. I have been promoting Kwau village for 2 years now. It is a nice area for travelers who are interested in learning Papuan traditional medicines and herbs, hiking and birdwatching. by Charles Roring

Migrating from Archicad to Sketchup

Architects now can design any 3D objects using various software such as Archicad, Revit, Rhino and Google Sketchup. Personally, I used to discuss a number of articles that are related to the design of floor plan for a small house using Archicad. This is really a great product from Graphisoft. Even though it is a very good BIM software for architectural design, it consumes a lot of disk space in my notebook PC. For more complicated designs, my computer runs slow. So, I was thinking of using smaller software that can be used to design 3D objects without consuming much of the memory inside my computer. For designing simple objects such as windows, doors, or a wooden bench, a light but powerful solution such as Google Sketch up is more suitable. I am now learning how to use this software. My first object that I have just designed is a wooden bench. I hope that within a few weeks, I will be able to create more complicated designs such as a house or even a boat. If I am able to do that, I will present them in this blog.

Google does not own sketchup anymore. Now it belongs to Trimble. If we open sketchup.com, we will notice the change in its logo. So, from now on we should not call it Google Sketchup but Sketchup only. 

The learning curve of Sketchup is low. Anybody can master it in less than two weeks. So, instead of learning 2D CAD software, I encourage you to learn this versatile 3D modelling software. by Charles Roring