Very few people can take a stack of boxes and turn them into a pleasing home. Only a trained architect, with certification in modular systems structures, can take those modular boxes and make them into classic Victorians, grace-filled Colonials, charming Cape Cods, and bold and light filled contemporaries.
A trained architect is always the answer but don’t take my word for it just because I am one. Let me give you an example.
A while back we were helping a factory with the styling of a home. They were wise enough to know that their customer wanted an attractive showplace sitting on his expensive piece of land. I kept calling the factory because I saw through progress photographs that they were centering the windows vertically on each other instead of the placement we had drawn in the plans.
We Americans love our new homes, but in recent years home buyers could expect to fork out $150-$200 per square foot to have their gleaming treasures built from scratch out of timber. Now that the financial landscape is changing, it is clear that the cost of building houses, stick by stick, is spiraling out of control.
The process of planning and building can be arduous. Architects often work with a customer for months, planning the perfect customized layout only to have the confused buyer change their mind on major details at the last minute. Once completed, this same overwhelmed homebuyer has to negotiate contracts with a builder while paying fees to town commissions for plan approval. This can take months of negotiation with hourly fees for re-engineering rising steadily against a customer’s planned budget.
Finally, an approval arrives and the customer sighs in relief until the general contractor begins hiring subcontractors with often competing schedules. The result can be a chaotic construction sequence with compounding interest on construction loans being the only thing that moves forward at a steady, predictable pace.