Most custom homes are failures. Not because they are poorly designed, but because they are based on a very poor brief. A home that looks about the right size with the right finishes will start to fail about two years after completion. The family will be sitting down to dinner at the kitchen island, because the formal dining room is too small.

Translate household patterns into measurable design criteria

Room counts are an abysmal starting brief for custom home design. A much better starting point is how a family currently uses the space in their home. That can be in their current home or in their current rental. It gives the designer much better information to work with than a simple room count. Write down how many times a day a family gathers in the morning. What do they drop at the door. How many rooms in a house are totally empty and unused on any given day for 6 days straight.

Now translate that into actual design criteria. Instead of asking for a mudroom, say that you need to store four sets of sports equipment, and that it will be near the laundry area. Instead of an open plan, say that you need to have sightlines from the main cooking area to the 2 areas where the kids under 10 will be left unsupervised.

Test the brief against the site early

Deciding on the basic massing of the house early in the design process (i.e. At the massing stage) is far more important to the family’s lifestyle than deciding on the interior design details later. Deciding on the solar orientation, floor levels, trees on the site and the constraints of the site’s setbacks early in the design process will determine whether or not certain aspects of the family’s lifestyle can be realized in the design of their new house. For example, morning light in the kitchen may be more important to a family than a rear-facing great room.

Match the delivery model to the family’s tolerance for risk

Picking a builder to construct your custom home is typically a process of picking between a few different builders. Rather, the family should be deciding the main points of how they wish to distribute the cost of the construction of their custom home, how they wish to exert design control, and how they wish to take on risk. It is not the builder’s job to decide these for the family.

What to verify before shortlisting

• Financial standing, including lien history and supplier payment terms
• Whether the site superintendent runs more than three active jobs
• Warranty response records from clients three to five years past closing
• How allowances were set on recent projects and how often they were exceeded

Budget in layers so priorities survive value engineering

Cost per square foot is a lousy planning tool. Instead, set up a budget for the structure and envelope of your house, the mechanicals, the finishes and the site work. Then list out your lifestyle priorities in each of these categories, and cut back on the less important priorities as costs exceed your budget.

Allow 8-12% of the total construction cost for contingency items. These need to be kept separate from finish allowance dollars. Families building in the Triangle are well served by studying how experienced builders of Raleigh Durham custom homes price site related issues, because utility and other municipal items can consume a large portion of the up front budget, leaving nothing for finish related items.

Specify performance, then verify it during construction

The details of construction are a long list of features that get “consumed” in the drywall. These are the features of a well constructed building that are invisible to the owners after the walls go up. Thus they are ignored in favor of more visible features of the house, like the cabinetry.

Milestones worth an independent inspection

1. Foundation and waterproofing, before backfill
2. Framing, before mechanical rough-in obscures structural connections
3. Window and door flashing, before cladding
4. Pre-drywall, with a blower door test and duct leakage measurement
5. Substantial completion, with a documented punch list tied to payment

Detail issues such as air sealing, flashing, etc. Become invisible after the drywall has been finished. Therefore, such details are best written into the construction contract as numbers (i.e., air changes per hour, duct leakage, etc.). Typically, the installation will be performed in accordance with the manufacturer’s standards.

Protect the design intent through the decision phase

By the time you get to making selections for your new home, most of the lifestyle criteria for your new home have long since eroded. I refer to “selections” for your new home as starting at about the time you reach month four of your new home selection process. As most selections for your new home get deferred until the last possible moment, they are subsequently selected under duress. Almost all of these last minute selections get reviewed by the contractor to determine if the selection makes sense in terms of cost and timing. Few of these last minute selections get reviewed to determine if the selection even meets the criteria that were originally established for your new home.

Establish selection deadlines for each discipline (e.g. Architecture, engineering, etc.) and measure change orders against the top 3 criteria of the family’s lifestyle priorities. Each decision will retain far more of the intent of the prior planning and design development than the sum of all of that work.