We need to talk

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t speak to people like you: consumers planning to build a new home - or considering planning to build- and exploring the cost of building. They are trying to understand how to forecast and control cost.     

In these calls, one of the most common miscomputation is that cost is directly proportional to house size; that a 1000 square foot house will cost a third of what a 3000 square house costs.   

Actually, that’s not the case. The average cost of a 3000 square foot house today is closer to $275 per square foot. The 1000 square foot home will likely cost $325 per square foot or $300,000. 

Sheri Koones, bestselling author of over a dozen books on important and timely housing trends (prefab, sustainable small houses, energy efficient masterpieces), is into downsizing. Sheri's coffee table books feature well designed homes of modern and transitional architecture.

Downsize, Koones' latest book, features two dozen houses, all under 2000 square feet, in which she describes how the homeowners chose to reduce the size of their homes and proved that ‘less is more” by collaborating with design professionals to create homes that feel larger and live larger than their size.

How tickled are we that a custom Warmmodern Living Lindal is included in the book about good sense and efficiency? Mighty tickled!

Read on for more on “Downsize" and to hear the homeowners of the featured Warmmodern Living Lindal speak about their experience and tour their home in a special video presentation.

In this post see how Warmmodern Living and Lindal create soothing interiors that flow seamlessly to the great outdoors. We feature two of our favorite Lindal capabilities.

Soothing Duotones 

How to create a calm Zen-like interior ambience. A great example in two hues.

Clients sometimes express concern that the use of multiple species of wood will result in a cacophonous interior. Not so. Warmmodern Living creates for each client a harmonious custom palette of wood finishes for the Lindal components to sooth the eye and the soul. Lindal’s pre-staining service not only provides a high quality finish but also gives clients real control of colors by providing test samples of colors under consideration on the actual material to be supplied in the Lindal kit.

Open Wide!

Lindals are admired for their transparency. Lift and slide doors as wide as 72 feet and as tall as 10 feet transform indoor and outdoor communal spaces into one free-flowing family and entertainment haven. 

The intimate connection of Lindal interiors to their exterior environments has no peer. The interiors are ever-changing reflections of the time of day, the daily weather, and the change of season.  

The August 2 Mansions section of the Wall Street Journal featured a piece written by Beth Decarbo entitled “Construction Hindsight is 10/10: Here are the things I wish I had known before building a house from scratch.”

The article begins on a high note by proclaiming that while the construction process was longer than she had anticipated, “building a house from the ground up has been one of the best experiences in my life.”

The rest of the article laments things Decarbo wishes she had known before construction began. The subheads and copy warn of surprises, disappointment, and even the need to go "underground" to save money. Your Warmmodern Living Lindal Experience would not be that way.

Prospective clients often have notions of what houses cost per square foot in their area. Quite often their notion from yesteryear is lower than this year’s reality.

Using ranges at the outset is not a flim flam approach. Many of my clients come to me on the rebound from a tragic experience with an architect in which their budgets have been exceeded by as much as 100%, a fact that was not known until the house was all planned.

My livelihood depends strongly on my ability to predict price accurately. If I underestimate the cost significantly and my clients cannot build their homes, I have worked for months for no gain. It’s as simple as that.