After decades of imagining and over two years of construction, my husband Peter and I are proud to confirm that dream homes do come true! As a child, I always dreamed of watching sunsets over the ocean. But, as with any dream, twists and turns abound. You rarely end up exactly where you planned. Embracing that process of discovery and evolving expectations along the way has been instrumental in transforming the house of our dreams into the dream we now call home.
A clean-slate design was uncharted territory for us. Our previous house-building experiences were more straightforward, the first relatively cookie-cutter and the second a semi-custom luxury home from the framing stage. Both were lovely and fit for purpose, but neither sated my childhood dream of an oceanfront home.
Then living through two Florida hurricanes in two years opened my eyes to mandatory evacuations and the increasing risks of climate change. A chance article about Charlotte’s two principal lakes triggered me to ask, “What about a lakefront home instead?” We moved into our dream home on Lake Wylie nearly four years after that pivotal conversation.
Everyone’s journey to build their forever home will be different. Armed with the clarity of hindsight, I’ve distilled our journey into five broad steps that may help you achieve your dream.
Step 1: Framing your dream
The first step in our personal dream house journey was redefining the “problem” we sought to solve. Dreaming is essential, but it can be counterproductive if you don’t invest the time to align your and your partner’s goals at the outset.
Once we opened our minds to replacing oceanfront with lakefront, we realized that proximity to a major airport was an equally important factor. I planned to serve on out-of-town boards, and we had many bucket-list personal travels ahead. We quickly concluded we could get everything we sought elsewhere, but without ever leaving the metro area we had called home for two decades:
- Two significant lakes plus a third smaller one
- Major hub airport
- Four seasons
- Two large health systems
- Top-notch educational institutions
- Broad cultural offerings
- An already established network of nearby friends and family
- A tolerable (albeit not ideal) tax situation.
If moving elsewhere, we would have spent much longer researching and comparing macro-options against these criteria. We instead explored more than 50 lots locally and decided on a lovely neighborhood on the North Carolina shores of picturesque Lake Wylie.
Step 1 in building your dream home is asking yourself what matters most. What life aspirations must be satisfied to look back three decades from now with no regrets? Once you’ve done your due diligence and established these boundaries, the real reveries can safely begin.
Step 2: Dreaming big within the box
Seeing our completed home today, you might ask if Peter and I began our process with some grand creative vision. Nothing could be further from the truth. But we made up for our lack of clairvoyance with an extensive wish list.
This list included must-haves like open living spaces, abundant glass to let light in, and a structure harmonious with its natural surroundings. We knew we needed to live primarily on a single level to enable us to age in place. It needed to be eco-friendly but technologically advanced. But most of all, we wanted a home that redeployed space from areas rarely used to those that maximize enjoyment.
As a founding member of the Board of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, I took inspiration from museum architect Mario Botta’s cantilevered design — beams anchored at one end to give the structure the appearance of floating in the air. Curious about modern architecture, we binged the BBC’s documentary series “The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes” and devoured Dwell magazine. We collected screenshots and clippings that would prove invaluable in early conversations with the architect and securing the permissions needed to build.
Allow yourself to go wild in Step 2 and consider your dream’s outlandish aspects. Look for inspiration from real places and media influences. Look deep inside yourself for what you treasure and daily annoyances to fix.
Step 3: Architecting the dream
You can bypass this step if you fall in love with a planned community or prefer the simplicity of choosing among existing floor plans and “semi-customizing” layouts and finishes. But if you seek to create a one-of-a-kind home, this design step is where the magic happens — translating your dream fragments into a buildable plan.
We understood this was a different customization scale than our first two builds. Yet we debated whether to select an architect or a builder first. The choice seems obvious in retrospect: the composer must write the symphony score before the orchestra conductor can get to work. Finding that trusted architectural partner with the artistic and technical skills to weave our dream fragments into a cohesive vision and buildable plan was our single most significant design decision — a path that only two percent of homes built in the U.S. share.
Our search for an architect started with personal referrals from architecture-savvy friends, supplemented by local home design and décor magazines, online platforms (e.g., Houzz), and good old-fashioned Google search. We had a choice of many highly regarded firms but struggled to find a focus on modern residential design in their broad portfolios. We remembered a recent newspaper feature about a local architect’s award-winning modern design for his family’s home. The cleverness of his thought process and emphasis on how living in the house should feel stuck in our minds. We sent him our design brief and clicked in the first meeting, so we invested in reference calls rather than a broad RFP.
We embarked on a 3-phase/9-month joint design process that ultimately took us from a pencil sketch to a complete construction plan. The first phase, schematic design, starts with creating a top-down view of the property, establishing the house’s footprint relative to its natural environs and the sun’s path — a source of winter heat but to be kept from entering the home during humid summers. Our earliest pencil drawings envisioned a cluster of three cantilevered spaces, with my office disconnected from the main house. When I refused to wear a raincoat, the architect added a glass breezeway.
The second phase, design development, focuses on the modular design of different living spaces and how they fit together. It was the process’ richest phase and involved a series of monthly working sessions with our architect, concentrating on capturing our hopes and expectations one area at a time. We separated the main floor between public and private spaces (our master suite, my office) to fit our living style. The piano room became the “heart of the home” that linked them. The downstairs was mainly for guests.
During this phase, we also engaged a modern interior designer (recommended by the architect) to amplify and extend his architectural vision to critical inside details. Custom cabinetry integrated vital storage to maintain a clutter-free look in our glass house. Ingenious surprises greeted us throughout (e.g., shelves conveying movement in the piano room).
As we fell in love with our home-to-be, we wanted to ensure the design would be technically and financially feasible. With our architect’s help, we interviewed and selected among the neighborhood’s guild of builders one with relevant build experience and a compatible style. Imagine your architect is the creative angel sitting on one shoulder. Your builder is the pragmatic devil perched on the other who helps ensure your $2 million budget doesn’t balloon to $10 million. You should plan to make design trade-offs: leave yourself headroom for the inevitable increases in the build step. When Peter’s Olympic swim lane added $600,000 with its separate retaining wall, we bought him a golf cart to drive to the clubhouse pool instead.
The third and final phase of the development process is the architect’s finalization of the construction drawings that will help translate the final design vision into the detailed plans engineers, and tradespeople require to build, wire, and plumb. Although phase three can seem the least exciting part of the design process, always appreciate the importance of structural engineering when creating cantilevered living spaces!
Make sure you are prepared to devote the time to Step 3 for your architect to understand how you want to live. Pick a partner you trust to lead you through the necessary decisions to converge on a final design. Engage the builder early to smooth the transition to the next step.
Step 4: Transforming your dream into reality
The satisfaction we felt upon completing our design was rivaled only by the joy of the move-in. Less delightful? The seemingly never-ending slog of construction in-between — an arduous process during the best of times, made even worse by supply chain challenges and labor shortages in the wake of Covid.
Building begins from the ground up. Depending on your lot, clearing, grading, and foundation work may take significant upfront time before the house can begin to take shape. And weather rarely cooperates. Patience is a virtue, even more so if you build in an area with complex zoning restrictions. Our lakefront property fell under the purview of the neighborhood’s architectural review committee, the electric power company that created the man-made lake, and the usual city, county, and even state authorities.
While the architect drives Step 2, the builder is the quarterback for Step 3, navigating complex approval processes and acting as the project integrator over a growing team of framers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters, and specialty craftsmen (e.g., stonemasons) who work together to deliver your dream house.
Amidst this intense execution phase, we knew there were areas so critical to our vision that we needed to be more hands-on in realizing them. Points of contention were often trade-offs between aesthetics (or functionality) and economics. For example, where to place solar panels to maximize power generation but minimize their visibility? Where must more expensive “home run” electrical wiring be used to enable highly configurable smart house controls? (My husband’s BSE in electrical engineering came in handy!)
We quickly learned that it’s OK to pivot when reality strikes if you keep sight of the ultimate vision. Covid-induced shortages and delays forced changes in materials and sequencing (e.g., every floor except polished concrete downstairs changed). Whereas the trade-offs made during the design step tended to be big picture/ strategic choices, those made during construction risk becoming “death by a thousand cuts.” We involved our architect as a consultant during the build to ensure that changes did not compromise the result and relied heavily on our interior designer to re-spec or change sources for critical fixtures.
Buckle in for the ride during Step 4. Know your most critical leverage points and how to impact them. When necessary, pivot but with your architect or interior designer (and maybe banker) nearby. Ultimately, remember to enjoy the ride — and take some keepsake photos. My husband’s best Father’s Day gift: a drone to take flyover shots as our dream unfolded.
Step 5: Living the dream
The more different your dream is from your current reality, the greater the change management to ensure you adapt your living style. Even though we were involved in every step of its creation, our home still held a few surprises.
After decades of accumulation, moving into a modern, minimalist space required a significant triage of personal possessions. We boxed up our keepsakes and discarded, donated, and sold many things from our old house but still filled a moving truck. As the movers unloaded boxes at our new home, we discovered them labeled with the old room names, many of which had no direct comparable in our modern spaces. A chaotic start!
The functionality of new or merged spaces has necessitated forming new habits and rituals. For example, my dressing area is separate from the bathroom, an intentional dividing line between a hot shower vs. hair and make-up. I worried the dressing area might seem awkward until I discovered its unexpected pleasures — a sunrise view, a “desktop” for multi-tasking early morning work, and a cozy escape nook for watching Netflix late at night.
Less endearing: bespoke builds bring bespoke problems. Although we moved in last year, we’re still addressing the inevitable rework and tweaks accompanying a new and highly custom build. Modern flat roofs without traditional gutters typically require a shakedown period to more fully waterproof problem areas not immediately evident. And our smart home is still learning.
While our organic home fits perfectly within the woodsy environs of Lake Wylie, it is an outlier compared to the more traditional homes in our neighborhood. We are known as the couple with the modern (or odd!) home. It’s enabled us to build new friends and engage with a broader modern architecture-interested community.
On a recent weekend walk, my husband observed that we would have only seen sunrises had we built our original East Coast beach house. Instead, we enjoy beautiful sunsets nightly from our west-facing modern lake house. We didn’t quite get my dream: we got something even better.