Working Backwards
An old housing industry trope is that only 2% of all houses are designed by architects.
The rest of the country’s new single-family home builds come from contractor plans or cut-and-paste tract developments. The result? Most of the houses in the country are kind of bad and kind of the same.
An incredibly high percentage of quality home designs do die on the vine. They’re never built because they're out of budget. Or, difficult to build with local contractor talent. Or they’re un-financeable and out of sync with local market conditions, and banks just don’t see a way to make the project’s economics pencil out.
Simply put, the designs just never made much sense for their context.
We built the HUTS design and development approach backwards. We asked ourselves what keeps beautiful, well-designed homes from getting built? And, more importantly: how would the process look if every design became a home?
Systematically, we crafted our approach to address each potential pitfall, maximizing the likelihood that what our clients dreamed of and what we designed would be executed.
Before we started discussing projects with clients, we talked through our home products and our approach with the organizations that can stop a project in its tracks.
We presented our Standards to financial institutions to make sure they saw the value in investing in HUTS homes.
We floated our plans by town inspectors and planning boards to catch any red flags in our home designs in advance.
We poured over our details and construction methods with local builders and engineers s to make sure our partners understood exactly what it means (and costs) to build a HUTS-designed home.
House designs are only as good as their ability to be translated into buildable, affordable, beautiful homes. After all, who wants to stare at plans, when you really wanted a house? We’re in the business of delivering homes, not just designs.
If you’re serious about building a beautifully-designed, affordable, achievable, equity-positive home (and cash-flow positive, should you choose) in your area, we should talk.
