I really hope that one day I am so incredibly rich that I can hire a team like yours. It would be amazing to have a professional firm design a house for you. I’m guessing you have to be in the 1% for that.
This comment got me curious, as it felt attainable/more commonplace to me. I did some searching, and according to gov.uk stats 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes. That is actually surprisingly high!
Impressive. Where I live you get a flat assigned and you put your old furniture in. Maybe you paint the walls, but they have to be white when you move out.
If you are doing well for yourself you buy a house from a project. It will be 150 identical homes next to each other. If you pay extra you get to decide the color of the kitchen and what tiles you want in the pre-designed bathroom.
It's quite common in the USA ... but since we have massive sprawl they will build whole neighborhoods at once, give you a choice of 5-10 different model homes and then you can customize on top of that. Sometimes a customization can be a whole floor.
If the builder does it correctly you really have to squint to tell which homes are the exact same since they are all slightly different.
> 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes
Worth to note that there is a huge practical difference between a "custom" and a "self-build" home.
- On "self-build" you take full personal responsibility for finding land, securing planning permission, managing the budget, and hiring architects or builders.
- On "custom" you buy from a developer who already has pre-approved planning permissions, often for a huge serviced plot targeting 20-30 homes based on some copy/paste concept, managing all aspects of the construction while you can influence minor aspects of the layout, style, and interior finishes.
Custom-built homes are very common in rest of Europe. It's a common scheme to buy a plot of land, plan a low-cost project of very densely placed, similar looking houses, reusing as many elements as possible to simplify permissions, and then allowing customers to pay for additions within those fixed boundaries.
The possible individual modifications are usually minor then, everything that requires re-submission for (structural/council/...) approval is not economic.
Then there's the "I self-build, my dad is a carpenter and I just bought this toolbox" category, which is such a minefield of fatal mistakes that movies and reality shows were made around it.
I think the market for "self-build but fully outsourced to a premium developer" is the ~1-2% bracket only...
I guess I'm in the .001%: my father in law built homes for a living and built his own home and every piece of furniture in it himself. Everything lasts longer and works better than in professionally built homes in my experience. He's a real marvel.
I suspect there may not many more people with his skillset after his generation passes.
Agreed, and from the people I know who fully self-build say they will never do it again. The amount of decisions and time it takes can be very stressful.
But when you go to very high end neighborhoods where you essentially pick a plot and a architect, no 2 homes are close to the same, all completely custom.
I would bet a lot of those are still not being designed by a team that is working for you specifically. It's also important that if the statistic is 7-10% of homes, that's very different from 7-10% of people living in such homes.
For a lot of building projects you need both pictures to send the government to get permission before you break ground; and also evidence of the structural calculations, and that the structural elements were built to design.
You can do these things without an architect, but there's enough demand to support an ecosystem of small businesses (say, 1 architect and 2 support staff). Not every project/architect uses a full 3D model - some architects produce a set of 2D drawings.