The purpose of this paper is to develop formal design principles towards flexible house plan. A flexible house plan accomodates spatial requirements corresponding to change of life style and provides a way of saving architectural materials. Design properties as a basis for manipulation of room includes adjacency, orientation and geometrical information which are suited well to flexible design. This paper has developed a formal grammar of shape which can be utilized to transform house plan. Flexible design presented here is based on the idea of various operations of the shape grammar. The shape grammar, as a set of rules, specifies manipulations of shapes for reorganization of spatial relationships of rooms in a house plan. It lists exemplary rules in control knowledge which guides design processes for modifying a plan. An example taken from house plan design is used to ilustrate important aspects of the flexible design which fundamentally provides the basis for architectural material saving.