Stop for a moment and think about the massive amount of faith and trust a custom home client has to muster to go forward with a high-end project. For architects and custom builders, creating and executing one-off designs is an everyday job. There is financial risk, of course, for the pro, but it’s nothing remotely like the risk the client must bear. In a way, a custom home client is a developer, with all the inherent pressures and potential pleasures that entails.
Every custom home built from a new design is a prototype. It’s never been built exactly this way before, and it’s everyone’s educated guess that it will function properly and delight as anticipated. With traditional designs, there is more precedent to rely upon—more tried and true materials, details, and building technology to bolster the project. That’s part of their appeal, in addition to the emotional responses, memories, and other associations they tap into. David to construct both traditional and modern houses, and has done both for more than 40 years, but it’s largely the modern work that’s lifted his company into the topmost echelon of builders in his region.
Custom clients just trust him. And so do the most demanding architects. For the guy who started in business as a roofing contractor, that’s a pretty big accomplishment. He got his start in 1975 reroofing shingle houses in Cape Cod. When work dried up on the Cape, he followed a friend’s advice and lit out for Houston, where oil-fueled boom times were going full tilt. “You tripped over work down there; there were job sites everywhere. I was an entrepreneur,” explains David. And his full-service contracting firm was born. “Forty-two years later, here I am,” he says—back in New England for decades and the best in the business at high-end remodels and new custom homes.
Yes, David has long-term experience in the building business. But there are other reasons clients and architects—and skilled trades—put their faith in him. Some of that has to do with the entrepreneurial side he mentioned. He doesn’t just build beautiful houses for other people, he knows what it’s like personally to be signing the checks on an ambitious custom project.
Bring in Da Noyes
Sixteen years ago, David and his wife and business partner, Deborah, bought a dilapidated midcentury modern house in New Canaan, Conn. The house, designed by Eliot Noyes in the 1950s, was highly experimental and theoretical. Built lightly had not aged well and was certainly not up to modern life in the new millennium.
Now, David could have simply repaired the existing house, but it would have functioned only as a shrine to midcentury architectural thought and not as a viable dwelling. Perhaps some would have been fine with freezing it in a bygone time, but David was interested in something more challenging. To help him plan an extensive renovation and reinvention, he hired Joeb Moore, of Joeb Moore & Partners in Greenwich, Conn.
Joeb’s work at the time was singular in its sensitivity to existing conditions and in the level of invention he was capable of bringing to any new additions. He’s an architect who thrives on theory and research in architecture, and he applied the full force of his talents on the Noyes remodel. As did David. Ultimately, Joeb’s new architecture allowed you to read the original Noyes house as a distinct building, then went on to create its own fresh dialogue and interaction with it.
Bring in Da Stars
This amazing work helped solidify the reputations of both builder and architect with clients and pros alike. David’s career now reads like a shortlist of well-known, accomplished, and technically demanding architectural firms: Toshiko Mori, Cutler Anderson, Olson Kundig, Bates Masi, and many more. “We want to work on the more demanding, stimulating jobs. We want to work with the top designers who do good plans,” says David. And they keep coming back. He and his team of 19 have built multiple houses for these architects and scores of others.
Why do they keep returning to David? Maybe because nothing fazes him. Not even Jim Cutler. “I’ve encountered no one else in my career who draws all his details himself,” says David, with considerable awe and admiration of Jim. “He hands you a book with everything drawn. Masonry work, framing details, window install details. You have to be up to the challenge to work with him.”
Meeting the high standards of the standard-bearers is one thing. David has aced this, as well as finessing relationships with high-powered clients. Here his experience, good humor, and dedication to getting the work done right go a long way toward allaying fears and tensions. But there are new complications these days for custom builders at this level of the profession. Chief among them is the advent of the “owner’s representative.”
Alas, the era of hard-won trust is eroding, and for a pro like David, it feels like a substantial loss and a needless stumbling block to the successful completion of a great house. “My first experience with an owner’s rep was a guy who said he was there to keep an eye on the architect. I respect it, but I don’t think you need it,” says David. “And we had one who was a table pounder. There was intimidation with that guy. Most of them are team players, and we are too. I have nothing to fear, but if clients ask me if I think they need one, I’ll tell them no.”
He posits that the concern comes from those who bring city thinking to the countryside. “Everyone who’s had work done in Manhattan feels they’ve been ripped off. The typical contractor invoice is a lien form,” he quips. “Then they come out to the suburbs, they feel they need protection. Like a bodyguard.”
Ahead of the Game
For David, much has changed over 40 years of business, but managing subcontractors has not. He believes in building the best team and treating them well over the long term. “Sure we push them on price,” he says, “but we don’t want to leverage subs to the point where they’re losing money.” And unlike many builders lately, he has no problem tapping good trades. “They find me,” he says. Worse come to worst, he notes, all his supers are “punch-list quality” and always able to get the job done.
In addition to the proliferation of owners’ reps, another new twist in the everyday lives of high-end custom builders is the lengthy and extensive preconstruction phase. “We now do mock-ups all the time. Small sections of the building—exterior skin, siding trim, roofing, overhang, corner detailing—stone veneer exactly as it will get built,” he explains. “We have a job in Greenwich, where we’re doing eight of them.
And everyone has to approve them—the landscape architect, the architect, the clients—everyone has an opinion.”
Unfazed and unflappable, he laughs. “Hey, we are set up to deal with demanding architectural needs. We know how to deal with submittals. And we know what the owners need. We assure them they’re going to get what they want. That’s the definition of a custom builder.”
