At our Luxury Dream Home Date Night Event, we discussed what steps to take when building your luxury dream home.
We were honored to have Brady Fenn & Adam Kostis join us for the evening. Brady Fenn, with Fenn Rogers Custom Homes, is a luxury home builder, contractor, and remodeler, specializing in new builds and full remodels. Adam Kostis is the Creative Director at Cosan Studio, a Scottsdale-based architectural firm, executing thoughtful, well-designed projects.
There are so many benefits of assembling your Dream Team at the beginning of your luxury new build project. We suggest selecting your members wisely, doing your homework & trusting your gut. Building a custom home is an exciting & extremely complex venture, and we encourage you to pick the team of professionals that you feel comfortable with, that you trust, and that you will enjoy working with throughout your project.
On a luxury custom home project, you have a builder, an architect, and a professional interior designer, and those three are your core team members. Throughout the entire project, you’ll add a landscape designer in there, you’ll add a cabinet company, and other vendors and your team will get bigger. But it is so important to hire those three critical professionals before you even have an idea on a napkin.
Brady, as a custom home builder, what would you say are some of the benefits of having all those professionals hired on the front end?
Brady Fenn: These three people are essentially who you can trust to build your dream home. If the project is starting to go down the wrong path or getting out of budget, these three people are going to tell you and assist in the process to get it back on track.
As builders, we want to be involved when you first start the plans, because we act as another advocate for the clients to stay on top of the architect and interior designer. We want to get it to the point where we can start building it as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality.
I think that that’s a big thing that we do as builders. Let us be your advocate to help guide this process. And sometimes we’ll be the bad guys, so that you, the client, don’t necessarily always have to be.
And obviously budget is a huge reason to get us involved early. We generally have a good idea of what things are going to cost, what the market is doing, which materials are delayed, and where we can possibly value engineer and bring up some good ideas of ways to save on cost without sacrificing quality.
Absolutely. Adam, in your experience as a professional architect, a lot of the time you get approached first. So how do you guide clients to get together that dream team at the start of a project?
Adam Kostis: I always like to think that ideas are whimsical. As architects, we’ve got whimsical ideas on paper. And clients, as well, have whimsical ideas for their dream homes. So that nature can spiral and get out of hand if you don’t have a structure within your team, and that team is the three of us. It includes that builder, that interior designer, and that architect. So, without those professionals, your ideas, as clients, are just whimsical.
Putting that pen to paper and making sure that everything is well thought out and methodical, that’s where things become more efficient. And we can start to get you exactly what you want in a faster timeframe working altogether. And time is money.
Another question we get is how can potential clients find that dream team. We know who the awesome builders, architects, and designers are in town because we’re in the field. What would you suggest for a homeowner? Where do they even start? How do they find a great architect, a great builder, and a great designer?
Adam Kostis: Instagram! Lol.
Brady Fenn: That’s a hard question, especially for us, because we don’t do the best job at marketing. We rely on word of mouth and reputation. Talking to someone who’s been through this process is important. And whoever you talk to and feel most comfortable with, within the three of us, whether it’s the architect, builder, or designer, we suggest really leaning on those professionals. There are lots of great builders and professionals out there, and there are different personalities and different fits.
And all have familiarity with the process too. As interior designers, you know how we build and who’s on our team. So you know what you can design and how we’re going to execute it. The same goes for the architect, we know how your process is. That familiarity helps the project flow more smoothly. And as you said, time is money.
It’s all about the Dream Team and getting those team players early in the process to ensure an efficient and beautiful project. Although we would love to say, “hire Alisha Taylor Interiors” – in reality, your dream team members must fit into your vision and expectations of the project, and vice versa. At Alisha Taylor Interiors, we don’t just design your custom luxury home details, but we focus on the client experience, bringing joy to building a custom home and alleviating stress.
The first step to starting your design process for your custom home is to select a Dream Team that will contribute to your beautiful, luxury custom home, and provide you with a professional, positive home-building journey.
