When you design and build your own luxury home, you aren’t just creating a space for you and your family to live in. You’re creating an environment that will support you and your loved ones over the years, a residence that celebrates all of your hard work and nurtures your desire to live your best possible life.
One day soon enough, you’ll be sitting on your porch watching the sunset over your incredible mountain views with good friends, good food, and your loved ones by your side. Between now and then, though, there are many steps and decisions to be made regarding how to go about creating your luxury estate.
There’s a good chance that one of the most pressing questions on your mind is– how much is this going to cost? While luxury homes are undoubtedly more expensive to build than a typical American home, in return, you are receiving an exceptional living space created with the finest materials by the best craftsman in the business.
To help you achieve the desired outcome while ensuring that your project stays on budget and on schedule, let’s take a closer look at everything you need to know about the luxury home-building process.
How Much Does It Cost to Build a Luxury Home?
Building a custom luxury home is quite a bit more expensive than building a traditional custom home– constructed with the finest materials and the highest-quality craftsmanship; luxury estates are in a league of their own both in excellence and in their price tag.
That being said, a multitude of factors will influence the final cost of your project– everything from the location and the materials you choose to the contracts you sign and the permit fees will be a part of the equation.
Factors That Influence the Price of Your Luxury Home
Before we discuss the typical cost per square foot for luxury projects, it’s necessary to break the process down into smaller parts to understand how many moving parts impact the price. Let’s break down some of the different aspects of the luxury build process that can have an influence on the total cost of building your dream home.
1. Location
The cost of a piece of land can vary immensely depending on where you’re shopping around, both in terms of what region of the country you’re in and what specific neighborhood you’re going to call your new home.
The most expensive home locations typically possess several key characteristics contributing to their high property values. These can include:
- Prime Urban Areas: Homes built in areas like Miami, New York, London, San Francisco, and Tokyo are highly sought after due to their proximity to job opportunities, cultural attractions, and world-class amenities.
- Waterfront Properties: Homes located along coastlines, lakes, or rivers usually command higher prices. These properties offer stunning views, direct water access, and a sense of exclusivity, driving up their value.
- Exclusive Gated Communities: Upscale gated communities with top-notch security, well-maintained common areas, and premium amenities such as golf courses, private clubs, and recreational facilities attract high net-worth individuals, pushing up property prices.
- Historical or Architecturally Significant Properties: Homes with unique architectural features and historical significance or situated in designated heritage districts often carry a premium due to their rarity, cultural value, and distinct charm.
- Scenic Locations: Properties nestled in picturesque settings, such as mountain retreats, vineyards, or rolling countryside, typically have higher price tags. These homes offer natural beauty, privacy, and a peaceful atmosphere that is highly desirable.
- Proximity to Top Schools: Areas with renowned educational institutions, particularly in prestigious neighborhoods, command higher property values. Families are often willing to pay a premium to secure a home in a top-performing school district.
- Infrastructure and Connectivity: Properties with easy access to efficient transportation networks, such as airports, highways, and public transit systems, are more valuable due to the convenience they offer.
- Limited Supply: In areas where land is scarce or strict zoning regulations limit development, property values can skyrocket as demand outpaces supply. This is especially true in prime urban areas and exclusive communities.
What determines the value of land is multi-faceted, but generally, the more in-demand your location is, the higher the price will be.
2. Materials and Craftsmanship
Standard homes these days are often built using inadequate materials that won’t stand the test of time. A true luxury home is built using high-quality materials and constructed by highly skilled craftsmen.
There will inevitably be a variety of quality options that you can choose from when designing your home, and your choices will impact the price tag.
3. Design and Planning
While practically an infinite number of stock home plans are available for purchase, these are genuinely subpar when compared to custom luxury home designs. Stock plans can get less affordable quickly when you begin making alterations to fit your needs, and they still struggle to complement the land on which they are built.
If you’re finally ready to construct your dream home, it’s worth working with an architectural design service that will be able to take the vision you have in your mind and turn it into a reality.
The cost of hiring an architect can vary greatly depending on a number of different factors– your location, the pricing model, the architect’s level of experience, and more.
For this reason, it’s necessary to speak with a number of architects before selecting one. To help ensure you pair up with the right person or team for your project, we’ve compiled a list of twelve essential interview questions to ask architects.
4. Finishes
When you’re designing a luxury home, you’re typically interested in the best-of-the-best in flooring materials, appliances, cabinets, hardware, woodworking, and so on. The finishes that you choose will have an effect on the overall price of the build.
For example, if you select custom handcrafted cabinetry and millwork, high-end plumbing fixtures, specialty in-laid wood flooring, complex architecture, and the like, you’re going to be spending quite a bit more money than someone who chooses standard finishes like stock cabinetry, common plumbing, and lighting fixtures, and goes with a basic architectural style.
5. Exterior
Another factor that will influence how much it costs to build your dream home is whether you want a more subtle or more elaborate exterior design for your home.
For example, a show-stopping modern house with lots of bold metal accents and huge glass windows is going to require more of an investment than a more standard stone or brick exterior.
6. Hardscaping
The more luxurious a home, the more likely you are to find gorgeous pools, multiple porches and decks, and large designed outdoor spaces.
Of course, this can have an impact on your budget, with the most elaborate installations coming with price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
7. Contractor Fees and Permits
Working with an experienced luxury home builder is absolutely vital when building your dream home. These are individuals that have a proven reputation for incredible craftsmanship and attention to detail, ensuring that your completed home is truly a dream come true. All of this expertise comes at a price, though– the best and most sought-after luxury contractors are going to charge higher rates than standard custom builders.
Additionally, there are often other associated fees that come along with the home-building process. The types of permits your build will require and the cost of each permit will vary greatly depending on where you’re building. While your contractors will be the ones that obtain the necessary permits, they typically add the cost of these into the total cost of the project.
Luxury Homes: The Cost Per Square Foot
Keeping in mind that many factors can impact the total cost of building a luxury home, some estimates posit that the cost per square foot for luxury builds is typically between $200 and $600 per square foot. By comparison, a more traditional custom home costs around $100 to $200 per square foot.
That being said, there are so many different factors that influence the final cost of your home. From the location of the land and the size of the structure to the finishing details and the permit fees, there are a lot of moving parts that add up to create the final dollar figure.
The most important thing when designing and building your luxury home is ensuring that you can stay within budget and settle into your new home on schedule. In the next section, we’ll look at the steps you’ll want to take in order to ensure that the cost doesn’t balloon far beyond your initial budget.
Building a Luxury Home: The Steps
The thought of building a house from the ground up is understandably quite daunting. Let’s take a closer look at each of the steps so that you can get a better sense of what the process entails.
1. Setting a Budget
Creating a budget for a luxury home can be difficult– since there are so many different components, it can be hard to know where to begin. You’ll want to consider how much you are willing to spend on everything from the land and the home finishes to the luxury features and mechanical systems.
Since so many elements come together to create your dream home, it’s all too easy to get lost in the details of fixtures and finishes. The bulk of your cost is going to come in the form of the actual construction of the home itself, but straying from your initial finish, fixture, and feature plans will certainly start to add up.
Setting a budget is the most crucial aspect of any building project. Even if you are truly in a position where money isn’t an object, you’ll still want to ensure that you are making a good investment and setting your home up to have valuable resale opportunities if you decide down the road to put it on the market.
Working with your design and build teams to ensure that your vision for your home will fit within your budget is absolutely key. That being said, it can be useful to sit down and come up with a ballpark figure of how much you are able to put towards constructing your dream home before you even start talking to architects or contractors.
2. Putting Together a Design and Build Team
It’s common for homeowners to begin the design phase of the process with a set sense of how much they want to pay per square foot for their luxury home. However, if an experienced builder isn’t incorporated into the design part of the process, it’s all too easy to end up with designs that ultimately exceed the budget once they are in the hands of a builder.
Having your architect and builder work together can ensure that your project both results in the outcome you want and stays within the budget.
3. Making Sure You Sign the Right Contracts (and Not the Wrong Ones!)
It’s easy to get so excited by the home-building process that you are eager to get all of the contracts signed. This is one of the most important parts of the entire process, though, and the last thing you want to do is sign your name to an agreement that doesn’t protect you from the many potentially costly mistakes of the luxury home-building experience.
In our Custom Home Guidebook and Workshop, we take an in-depth look at every aspect of the luxury home-building process, including what you should look for in contracts and what clauses you will want to see before you can feel comfortable with signing.
4. Finding the Right Piece of Land
There are countless factors you will want to consider when selecting the right property for your dream home– the topography of the land, the view, the shape, the proximity to amenities, and so much more. Whether you’re looking to build a beachfront oasis or a mountaintop retreat, finding the right piece of land is something that can take quite a bit of time and research.
Of course, you’ll also want to ensure that you completely understand any restrictions put forth by the community you choose to build in. Some luxury home communities have strict architectural guidelines regarding how your house is built, not to mention rules about how you use your property.
5. Creating a Design That Fits Your Budget
While you likely have many ideas in mind in terms of design before you’ve selected a property, you ultimately want to design your home around the land on which it will be built. The shape of the land, the direction of the most breathtaking views, and practical considerations like setbacks all need to be taken into account when creating the blueprint for your new abode.
This is one of the reasons that custom home designs are far superior to stock plans– mass-produced stock plans can’t complement your unique property in the same way. When a skilled design and build team is using the land to inform the design process, it can create the truly outstanding result of an estate that appears to have sprung up out of the earth rather than seeming as though it was unnaturally plopped down on it from above.
Are You Ready to Start Building Your Dream Home?
Building a house from scratch is a big project, but with the right design and build team, a reasonable budget, and a vision, making your dream a reality is more than possible.
Though it’s easy to get scared away by nightmare stories of builds that go far beyond the intended deadline or burst through the anticipated budget, building your own home really can be an enjoyable process that you remain in control of from start to finish.
At Dream Home Studio, it’s our mission to help as many people as possible achieve the home they have always dreamed of without dealing with costly mistakes or surprises.
