For big builders, the party is over. The days when they could churn out the same five plans from the home office and sprawl them across the country are on the wane. Dwindling lots, more sophisticated and diverse buyers, burdensome regulations, and tougher competition mean they have to pay more attention to architecture and land planning than ever before.
Most big builders have realized that good design is no longer a high-end custom option but a basic necessity in the battle for move-up, luxury, niche, and even entry-level buyers. And with more builders crowding the hot markets, they’re learning it’s their best bet for beating the competition.
In response to those trends and the consolidation fever that’s made the biggest builders even bigger, many companies have decentralized their design departments. The new wisdom believes these entrepreneurial divisions can respond more quickly and more specifically to a piece of land or a market trend, either with their own in-house talent or, increasingly, with the help of outside architecture firms. For architects, that means the party is just beginning.
Local Wisdom
Almost everyone is convinced that the old trickle-down approach to design just doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to dig deep into the local market to determine what it needs, what it wants, and what it’ll buy.
“You don’t want to answer a question that nobody asked,” says Bud McIntire, vice president of architecture for Atlanta-based John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods. “The most important thing is to get a real good idea of who the buyer is–their preferences, their budget, their psychographics. You don’t want to come in and design a beautiful house that nobody wants.”
McIntire oversees a large, busy staff of 19. “We tailor our elevations to specific neighborhoods and we have strict rules about variation in elevation and color,” he explains. “We have design review meetings every week, continuity in the team, and consistent judgment about what our customers are looking for in a house.”
For Wieland Homes, the centralized design shop works very well. But that’s because it’s one of the smaller big builders, it’s deep into a limited geographical region its people know intimately, and it builds primarily for a narrow demographic of wealthy buyers.
Wieland’s operation has turned into a kind of farm team for the majors. Both The Ryland Group and Centex Corp. have regional design directors who trained under McIntire. They, too, tout the importance of local market needs and tastes. They believe design should trickle up from the regional offices. “We just started regionalizing architects two years ago,” says Joe Stein, who runs the architecture department at Centex’s Raleigh, N.C., regional office. “All architects were out of headquarters in Dallas, and every week we would go out to different regions. No one architect would specialize in a region. It had its price. The architects never had time to get anything but superficial. Everything looked like it came out of California. I had that beaten out of me at John Wieland.”
The Ryland Group, headquartered in Columbia, Md., came to the same conclusion about six years ago, when new head honcho R. Chad Dreier breezed in from design-forward California. “When Chad came in 1993, the second thing he did was to decentralize,” says Thomas Devine, Ryland’s regional architecture director for the South and another Wieland Homes graduate. “In the old days, the division presidents didn’t deal with product, they were just given it. But nowadays, you have to be responsive to the marketplace. Our driving force is not to use something just because we have it. It must be market driven. Those are our marching orders. Chad’s gotten the regions and divisions to be more entrepreneurial.”
Hired Guns
With their states’ rights firmly in hand, many regional and divisional offices are going out of house for design. In part, it’s because the building boom has spawned more work than any in-house team can handle, but it’s also because outside architecture firms provide advantages inside guys may lack.
Hiring outside architecture firms can be the fast track to mastering a regional look, exploring a new market niche, building a specialized community, or freshening an existing product line. Even staff-heavy Wieland Homes goes outside from time to time. “We’ll go out of house when we’re in a niche we’re not familiar with,” says McIntire. “For instance, we used Looney Ricks Kiss for a Neo-Traditional project.”
Centex hired out to add a multifamily project to its mix. “We wanted to build some four-story condos in Myrtle Beach,” Stein recalls. “Instead of developing it from scratch, we went to The Martin Organization, which had already developed a similar product for the Washington, D.C. area market.”
Some big builders prefer to farm out most of their design work. Houston-based U.S. Home Corp. relies almost exclusively on outside firms for its architecture. The company believes that approach keeps its designs fresh and gives it an edge with Byzantine government authorities. “It’s more of a competitive issue for us,” says Chris Rediger, president of operations for U.S. Home. “Local firms often have credibility with local governments.”
If a builder is new to an area, an architecture firm with a sterling reputation can smooth the way not only with local governments but also with all-powerful citizens’ groups. When Taylor Woodrow Homes decided to take its high-end show from Southern California upstate to exclusive Marin County, across the bridge from San Francisco, the no-growth residents started snarling. But to design its new development, Traditions, the company called in William Hezmalhalch Architects, which has a Bay Area office and strong local relationships. “It definitely gave them a leg up,” says Hezmalhalch. “There’s a big learning curve for builders new to the Bay Area. And Marin County is especially anti-growth and anti-production builders. Some of the projects we take on have tried for approval 10 times before we get them through.”
Hiring an outside architecture firm can also enable companies to respond more quickly to a market opportunity. The venerable production-housing design firm Bloodgood Sharp Buster Architects and Planners are lords of this dance. One of their most sought-after services is a four-day charrette. Armed with lots of advance research from a builder’s division office, Bloodgood swoops in with a flock of architects and brainstorms new designs with the builder’s key people. A kind of architecture SWAT team, they leave the builder at the end of the week with good-to-go schematics that would have taken an in-house shop months to develop. The builder’s CAD guy takes them the rest of the way. “Our Dallas office does about two of these a month,” says Dan Swift, partner-in-charge of Bloodgood’s Southwest regional office in Dallas. “Once a client sees how fast they can react to a piece of dirt, they realize there’s no better way.”
Quality Control
So, what could be wrong with the fast-acting, market-savvy, regional approach to architectural design? The major issue right now for in-house and freelance architects is quality control.
Ryland’s Tom Devine finds it difficult to keep his plans clean in these decentralized days. “I could maintain my standards more meticulously before,” he says. “Now, if I share product between divisions, each modifies the plans with AutoCAD for local vendors and codes.” Each time someone alters a plan –and computers make that so much easier–another avenue opens up for errors and omissions.
Take those shaky plans to the field, where there’s an acute shortage of expert subcontractors, and you’ve got another big problem. “With the declining skill level in the trades, plans have to be more comprehensive to maintain quality,” says Centex’s Stein. “You can’t put out a very basic set of plans anymore and be sure it’ll get built well.”
Still, he’s sure that the decentralized approach is best–there just aren’t enough hours in the day to perfect it. “The biggest challenge is to get to the next level. I travel so much and work on so many new plans, it’s hard to get past the schematics to design development. I do anywhere from 150 to 200 plans a year. In private practice, we’d do 30 to 40 in a pretty full year,” he explains. “We’re trying to train division presidents to follow through on the designs. We want to get better at maintaining design integrity so that quality doesn’t drift so far. Now, I do a sketch, leave it with them, and then they forget the intention and hand it off to a CAD operator. All along the way people come in and change things. Six months later, I come back to walk the prototype and it doesn’t look anything like the concept I left with them.”
Nobody wants to put the genie back in the bottle. And probably no one can. “Buyers are more educated and the competition is tougher,” says Devine. “Architecture is a local business now.” For architects everywhere, that’s cause for celebration.
