To build or not to build, that was the question facing 36-year-old Devin Mathews and his wife Gina as they moved their young family back to Chicago last year.
Temporarily settled in a Gold Coast condo, Devin and Gina started cruising the single-family home market with three options in mind: buy a spec house, rehab an existing house, or design and build their own custom house. The couple had successfully gutted and rehabbed their home in Boston, but the full-time job of managing the rehab process seemed too daunting when their young daughters and Devin’s new job entered the equation.
The couple next looked at spec houses, but they found themselves picking and choosing what finishes and features they liked and didn’t like from one house to the next.
“You walk around the house and think, wow, this is really nice, but I would’ve used the money here instead of there,” says Devin. “Once you start doing that, you figure, we’re kidding ourselves—let’s just go build a house. We’ve got time to build exactly the house we wanted, so we figured why not do it?”
Time—and patience—is exactly what you need to embark on the custom homebuilding process, says Teak Barton, president of Glenview-based Macnon Builders, which builds custom homes typically in the $800,000 to $2 million range in “sweet spots” along the North Shore, most of which is a custom home market. “It’s not something you can do in between driving the kids around to soccer games,” Barton says.
The process of designing and building a house can typically last anywhere from 10 months to two and a half years, says John Anstadt, managing principal of the Design Group at Orren Pickell Designers & Builders, based in Lincolnshire.
Most design-build firms will help clients find lots for their houses, a process that Anstadt admits may take some time, and both the topography of the land and the zoning regulations of the neighborhood or city establish the parameters of what kind of house can be built on the lot.
Mathews, who found on his own a lot in Winnetka and chose Pickell as his design-build firm, had a two-month holdup during the permit process because of talks with the Village about a tree that sat on his lot.
“You gotta just roll with it,” he says.
If a client is bringing in designs from an outside architect, a design-build firm can offer suggestions for improvements and build off those plans, Barton says, but he thinks building costs can sometimes double in those cases. “A good design-build guy can keep you more in line with a realistic budget as you’re designing,” he says.
Initial prices are established at the outset, with $200 per square foot a common starting figure, but costs can increase or decrease throughout the process. “For instance,” Anstadt says, “if you have the Donald Trump style and want everything gold-plated, we’re going to add a dollar amount in there for the level of finish.” Builders continually inform clients of updated prices as things progress, and Mathews advises, “You should definitely have financial wherewithal.”
The first meetings between a client and a design-build firm are largely conceptual. “How do you live, what is your philosophy on living, what is a house to you. . . very high level, philosophical stuff,” Mathews says.
“We really listen carefully about how they’re going to use the house, how long they think they’re going to live there, what their future family expansion plans are,” says Barton.
If clients come to his firm without any design in mind, Anstadt asks them to draw up a wish list of things they’ve always wanted in their home. “One of the first things we ask is—’you walk in your front door, what do you want to see?'” says Anstadt. “And the plan starts to develop around that.”
Clients might not know specific architectural styles, but a consistency emerges from the different desires people have, Anstadt says. His architects create a free-hand sketch with the clients and refine it at subsequent meetings, first designing the first-floor layout, then the elevation and finally the second floor and lower level. The entire design process can typically last between one and four months, says Anstadt, with the clients and builders meeting every couple of weeks.
Throughout the design process, a good design-build firm must keep clients on track with the myriad of decisions that they face. Pickell Builders offers clients a real-time, Web-based timeline of their house’s progress and the meetings they need to have. At Macnon Builders, clients receive a binder with a flow chart and a 75-page book that illustrates the step-by-step process of choosing every little thing that makes a house a house—from the shingles on the roof to the light switches in the basement.
Clients are given detailed lists of showrooms to visit, people to see, decisions to make and deadlines to work under. “It’s extremely organized so that people can see exactly where they’re at, what happens next and what we need from them,” Barton says. “Everything about our business is geared to elicit the decisions we need from a client in an orderly fashion and to give our advice where appropriate.”
“It’s an overwhelming task if you think about all the items that go into a house,” says Anstadt. “It’s more than most people want to think about.”
To condense an otherwise sprawling range of choices, most design-build firms will narrow down selections of things like building materials, floor coverings, cabinetry and plumbing fixtures by making recommendations based on the clients’ style and budget.
“We try and give guidelines and templates for what works well, but we don’t want to hamper people’s creativity,” Barton says. While his firm has built everything from a 500-square-foot closet to an indoor athletic court in its custom houses, Barton acknowledges that most people express themselves more through the layouts of their homes than by radical elevations or lavish interior finishes.
Like Devin and Gina Mathews. With their two children in mind, they chose to emphasize the informal space in their house, eliminating superfluous rooms they found in many North Shore homes and maximizing the amount of livable space.
“I don’t need the mahogany library when I have a four-year-old,” Mathews says. “If I’m spending this much money on a house, I’m going to use the whole damn thing.” They designed a large eat-in kitchen for family gatherings, transition spaces, private guest space for out-of-town family members and interior architectural details that were missing in spec homes, like moldings and built-in cabinets and bench seating.
Once construction on a custom home gets underway, clients are encouraged to visit the site at various stages of construction.
“Most clients can’t visualize things very well, especially on paper,” Anstadt says, “so it’s very beneficial to walk the site with them at certain stages just to ensure that their initial thoughts are still on the same path.” Anstadt typically takes clients on site-walks every couple of weeks once the framing is up; here, they can review and confirm choices they’ve made and get a firsthand view of where things like lights, electrical outlets and surround-sound speakers will be.
At this point, homebuilders acknowledge, clients sometimes change their minds, but careful planning and realistic expectations established early on can keep the process from dragging on with no end in sight. While most clients make only “little tweaks” here and there, he says, Anstadt once had to tear out the foundation and move a pool house because the client didn’t like the way it sat relative to the sun’s trajectory.
On average, Anstadt says, a picky client who makes lots of changes can add a month or two to the project, and clients bear the costs of changes made after deadlines.
“People get passionate,” he says. “They’re building a $5 million house, they’re going to be passionate about certain things. With design-build, we can jump on those things quicker that most.”
Indeed, the coordination afforded by a design-build firm is the biggest advantage of the custom homebuilding process, says Mathews. The superintendent on the job calls him once a day to report on the progress of the house.
“Because it’s all one place and they all work together, I’m not the go-between between an architect and a contractor and sub-contractors and interior designers and all this stuff,” he says. “I call one person and she handles all the conversations with everybody. Nothing slips through the cracks.”
Considering the partnership between builder and buyer can last for years and involves one of the most significant and intimate parts of people’s lives—their homes—Barton stresses the importance of a strong rapport based on trust, communication and even chemistry. “It’s almost like a mini-marriage,” he says.
Design-build is not an option for people who need or want something fast, or for people who don’t want to do their homework, Barton says, and people who aren’t particular about what goes into their homes might as well buy on spec. “It’s like the difference between buying a Pinto and a Mercedes,” he says. “If you can’t recognize the difference, go ahead and buy the Pinto.”
Bridging the divide between the design-build and spec worlds is the semi-custom home. Northbrook-based Ferris Homes offers levels of customization in its single-family development Liberty Grove in Libertyville. Andrew Ferris, president of Ferris Homes, says the semi-custom homebuilding process is a better fit for people with more stringent time demands, or those who need a starting point and a smaller, more manageable process.
Instead of going through the conceptual process with a design team, buyers at Liberty Grove choose from established designs that fit within the common architectural theme of the development. They can choose from a narrowed range of interior and exterior finishes—including masonry, cabinetry, floor coverings and plumbing fixtures—with upgrade options available, and Ferris says he can deliver a house within one or two days of the closing date established at the outset.
“It still gives them a chance to put their own personality in the home,” Ferris says.
After all the time and hard work spent, Mathews thinks that’s what it’s all about—living in a place that’s not just a house, but an extension of the homeowner’s personality. Nine months into the design-build process, and with potentially another year to go, Devin Mathews can already see his family reflected in the house it is building.
He says, “I think people will come in and say, ‘clearly you guys built this house.'”