Custom home building takes an extreme amount of highly developed skill and experience on the part of the house construction company and patience and discipline on the part of the owner.
Building your luxury house also takes a great deal of time and financial resources on the behalf of the owners.
In order to collaborate with a master builder skill set, the owner’s commitment to due diligence is the successful formula for a rewarding high quality luxury home building experience.
Houston home building takes time, commitment and patience to traverse a journey that can take 18-24 months from the beginning of design through completion of your Houston luxury home.
It is not uncommon for finding a suitable home building site to take months to years. So, all in, you could be looking at the better part 3-4 years from the moment you get the inspiration to pursue this lofty dream.
Having a grasp of the realities of building a house from scratch is as important as the actual house construction itself.
This is not something that is for the faint of heart or a process that is friendly to start and stop like a hobby.
Once you have made the commitment to your house designer and your builder to emerge into the house construction process, you begin spending money and visualizing your plan design reflecting your lifestyle.
Custom Home Building in Houston Requires Many Steps and the Professional Services of Builders and Designers
Preparing for Your Luxury Home Design
Having made the commitment to yourself to build a luxury home in Houston you need to start preparing and planning for this journey.
This can be an overwhelming number of tasks if not organized in your thoughts. So, we always recommend getting a fairly good idea in your mind of the type of luxury house and it’s details you want to build.
This does not mean that you need to have a clear image of the front elevation or even a floor plan rendering prepared.
What this means is that you have seen enough luxury houses in the area to first identified the preferable location area you wish to live and secondly have recognized the architectural style of the house you wish to build.
Take some time to start collecting house ideas and architectural features you are attracted to. Store these images to share with your custom house designer and builder during the professional selection procedure and during the design process.
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Finding the Perfect Home Site
If you are living in a metro area and do not want to commute from the suburbs, finding the perfect building site is going to take some time.
So, if you are focused on metro living you will likely be looking for a property with an existing house already positioned there.
This type of house for sale is referred to as a tear down. We recommend identifying several areas of the city that fit your needs.
This allows for the house site search process to be expedited and if the deed restrictions are not acceptable or the deal falls through, you have not wasted your time waiting on a lot that is not conducive for your needs.
Having a real estate firm working in your behalf is also recommended. There are houses that are available through pocket listings that never go on the market.
It is through real estate networking that these properties are found. This will decrease the time it takes for your home site search.
But be mindful that you should provide your real estate firm of your general home site criteria and targeted areas so not to have them wasting your time on properties you would never consider.
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Selecting the Right Home Builder
Once you have launched your home lot search it’s time to select the right house builder for you.
Finding custom builders is not the challenge, rather finding a luxury builder that is like minded in their business acumen and that is a pleasure to work with can take some time.
There are a number of ways to approach this but what we recommend is to start with researching the internet. Look at their portfolio and read some of their published materials.
If their work speaks to you dive deeper into their profile like reading customer reviews and checking their DNB or Bloomberg ratings for financial stability.
Once you have created a general list of luxury builders have a phone conversation with them sharing your project vision, while discussing how they operate and some details of their luxury house building process.
From these steps an owner can normally make a short list of possible builders they want to interview further for their custom home building leadership.
One of these methods is when the actual vetting process begins through detailed questions and situational scenarios to determine who you want to work with.
We have provided a list of builder questions to assist you in qualifying your contractor.
Selecting the Right Custom House Designer
We recommend selecting a custom builder and designer to work together. This develops a ground work for a working relationship beyond the design phase.
It also reduces the likelihood of a luxury house being designed substantially over your investment budget.
There are 2 design approach methods to achieve this result. The traditional approach is to hire the custom designer independently to create a house design and the construction documents.
Then solicit your short list of custom builders to provide you with a bid proposal.
The second approach is to select the design build approach toward your home design. In the design build approach, your hire the custom builder to provide you both the design and a custom built house.
They may work with an independent house designer or have an inhouse designer. The benefits to you as an owner are that there is a single point of responsibility for entire project and mitigates the owner’s risk for design errors and omissions.
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The Luxury House Design Process
This is the artistic and imaginative stage of custom home building. You have shared the images you have collected from the beginning with your design team consisting of your custom builder and your house designer.
The process is generally discussed as 3 phases of architectural design. There is a concept stage, the working drawings stage and the engineering and final plan development stage.
These are the progressive stages of creating luxury construction drawings from imagination to specifications of a finely finished luxury house.
During the building design of your custom home, you will be required to identify product finishes that you will want to use.
Products such as flooring materials, windows, doors and exterior surfaces are required to know for developing construction documents.
In most cases it does not require that you have actually made the brand selection but rather you have identified the product such as; natural wood flooring instead of engineered flooring or stucco exterior instead of brick.
These types of selections are required to ultimately complete the home plans for engineering. To read more about the architectural design process visit our link.
Cost of Building a Custom Home
The cost of custom home building is always a relevant and important topic during and after the house design stage.
A word to the wise, if the owners do not work with the design team effectively to manage their luxury house design, the design process will manage them.
That is if the owners are not aware of the cost of certain architectural features, they will not be able to make value based chooses about these features until after the fact.
We have found that it is not the cost that troubles owners about custom home building, for they should have had these conversations with the design team before commencing a custom home.
But rather they object to construction expenditures that they cannot see the value in. For each owner this is different and varies dramatically.
It is the finish products that have the greatest impact on the total cost of building a custom home.
By proactively managing these types of items while selecting house products during house design, the owner can save both time and money during the construction phase.
Houston Luxury Home Building Process
Getting to the luxury home building stage of home building is both electrifying and anxious at the same time.
On one hand you are ecstatic to have finally reached this stage but you are anxious about what the luxury home you have toiled over is going to look like when completed.
This is natural and should be generally disregarded as a result of a new experience. If you have worked with your luxury builder to build a trusting working relationship then those dividends will pay off.
Professional custom builders want the custom home building process to progress smoothly with as few of interruptions as possible.
This means that they will schedule progress meetings with the owners on a structured schedule to review the progress and discuss decisions that are required to be made and the status on pending product selections that need to be ordered.
During these meetings your builder will have arranged samples to be prepared for the owners to see.
Your builder will also have material or color samples displayed on site to make decisions from.
The right custom house builder for you will take a personal stake in building a custom home. Luxury homes are not just another house but rather monuments to the profession of custom home building.
They are collaborative endeavor between the house designer, luxury builder and the owner that should stand the test of time as functional architectural artwork.
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Conclusion
Obtaining the guidance and leadership of a professional home builder is essential for a rewarding and successful custom home building journey.
They will guide you through the selection of a building lot, the design process, the home construction process and stand behind the structure with a warranty.
