Meet Your Custom Luxury Dream Home on the Internet

It took Lynn and Craig Ferguson more than two years to carve out their two-acre personal paradise on the wooded shoreline of Lake Martin in Alabama.

The couple's 5,300-square-foot home is customized to their vision explicitly, even though they didn’t hire an architect to design it from scratch. They bought a pre-existing construction plan from the website of an architectural firm located in South Carolina.

"We couldn't be happier with how it turned out," said Lynn Ferguson, a retired accountant. "We have built a couple of homes and remodeled a number of homes, but this is the first one that is totally ours."

The couple had always dreamed of spending their retirement years by the beautiful 44,000-acre lake. To build their forever home, they started the project with specific ideas. "Craig wanted a fully functional first level and a lake view from every single window. I wanted a butler's pantry and two islands [in the kitchen]," Mrs. Ferguson said. "And that's what we have!"

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While the Fergusons appreciate the budget-friendly factor of their choice, they highly valued other advantages of their pre-existing plan, which had already been used to build a number of homes.

"They provided photo galleries of almost every room so you could better see the space, understand the flow of the house, and what changes you want to make. That's difficult to do just from a rendering," Mrs. Ferguson said.

"There were pictures of two homes on that plan site in particular at the time. Ours is one of them now," she giggled with pride.

Pre-existing plans offer buyers chance to visualize their new home

Wealthy homeowners are taking notice of the conveniences of pre-existing plans. A Houzz.com survey shows that among homeowners who built a new home on their own lot in 2015, 15% of households earning over $500,000 a year and 25% of families with income of $200,000 to $499,000 used pre-existing plans, often referred to as "pre-drawn plans."

An ocean of pre-drawn plans is available for browsing on websites of the designers or home plan publishers, who sell large selections of plans and act as brokers for architects and designers. A client can order a detailed blueprint in either digital form or hard copy. Most of the designers work with customers on modifications for an additional fee determined by the amount of extra work. The process is much less time-consuming than designing from scratch.

A plan that had been previously executed also offers additional assurances, as homeowners are able to see their imaginations become reality.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," said Dominic Foley, publisher of Donald A. Gardner Publishing, whose magazine, Designer Dream Homes, showcases finished houses designed by the South Carolina firm, Donald A. Gardner Architects, who also designed the Fergusons’ lake house. The firm’s portfolio contains over 1,000 pre-drawn plans.

"Over the last 10 years or so, there's certainly been a move toward taking some of the efficiencies that this industry offers to somebody building homes toward a more upscale and higher-end home market," Mr. Foley said.

Design visualization was a dealmaker for the Suggs family in California, who just built their 4,765-square-foot luxury home.

"The No. 1 problem is that people would take a year for the architect to design their dream home which they think is great," said Dennis Suggs, 40-year-old owner of a mobile game company. "But when the framing goes up, then they realize 'oh my God, this room is way too small', or 'this doesn't make sense at all'."

Mr. Suggs and his wife chose to build with Toll Brothers, a "one-stop-shop" luxury home builder headquartered in Horsham, Pennsylvania. The company constructs customizable homes from a large selection of their own pre-designed plans in hundreds of communities across the U.S.

Toll Brothers also cured another major headache the Suggs family had when they first planned to build a complete custom home. "Even if we had the best idea and best design, just finding that lot in a neighborhood that we wanted, that just doesn't exist," said Mr. Suggs, who was pleased with the roomy corner lot purchased directly from Toll Brothers.

Homeowners who prefer to compare a large selection of pre-drawn plans often shop with plan publishers, such as theplancollection.com, who deals with over 22,000 pre-drawn plans on behalf of more than 90 architects and designers. About 20% of the company's sales in 2016 were designs of homes over 3,000 to 3,500 square feet, according to Tim Bakke, director of publishing of The Plan Collection.

Last year, the publisher sold an 11,027-square-foot house plan to a customer in Abu Dhabi. Up to 15% of their orders were from foreign countries, Mr. Bakke said .

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Homeowners take control of customization

Around 90% of high-income households who built homes from pre-drawn plans in 2015 made plan modifications, according to the Houzz.com survey.

Pre-drawn plan publishers often serve as an intermediary between designers and clients who request plan customizations. Mr. Bakke said 30% of The Plan Collection sales are modifications.

Last year, the publisher sold a 6,403-square-foot home plan for $3,800 to which the client had the designer add an elevator.

That plan’s creator, Colorado custom home designer Jon Rentfrow, has worked with many pre-drawn clients. He said that modern communication technology simplifies working with remote clients.

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"People sent pictures. I've had clients get on their lot, where we did FaceTime together. It's helpful," Mr. Rentfrow said. "It's not perfect, because nothing is better than standing there yourself and being able to put it in your memory bank. But the ease of shooting a one-minute video and texting it to somebody makes it all that much easier."

For the Suggs family in California, the modification process was also technology-enriched. Aside from model home tours and in-person consultation, their builder, Toll Brothers, powers an online designing tool for clients to play with modification presets.

Some of the builder’s home plans come with up to 15 types of alteration options for the master bedroom suite and up to 30 available changes to the kitchen, which are two of the most modified sections of the house, according to Tim Gehman, the director of design of Toll Brothers. The company also grants certain "out-of-the-menu" modification wishes.

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"Even though it's not a fully custom home, we are really more semi-custom. They can come to us to make a sort of standard plan their own plan," Mr. Gehman said. "You can have the same house five times in the same community and they would not be all alike."

The Fergusons took a more traditional but also effective approach to modify the plan for their lake house with the help of local builder Bobby Cannon Homes. They converted a screened porch into a "keeping" room (a small room attached to the kitchen) moved the fireplace, added a butler's pantry and a second kitchen, flipped the design of the laundry room and altered the master bedroom’s closet.

"We had to wait for our special stone blend for six months," Mrs. Ferguson said. "But it was a lot of fun. I have an entirely new skill set that I didn't have before."

She is looking forward to finishing up the 12,000-square-foot lower level storage area after they move in.

"We'll either add a couple of more bedrooms or build a big bunk room," she said. "It depends on how many grandchildren we end up having."