2001 Pacesetter Awards: Excellence in Design

Tony Calvis and Gary Wyant

Custom builders who offer design services have a choice to make: Charge a design fee and risk scaring off potential clients, or offer design at no charge and risk investing expensive design hours in projects that never break ground. Tony Calvis and Gary Wyant have never charged for their design work — which they provide on a speculative basis before signing a contract — and they have had no reason to reconsider that practice. “We have only lost two projects in 15 years,” Calvis says.

Part of their success is the result of intuition. “We rely on our sense of character judgment,” says Calvis, who screens leads as carefully as they do him. The partners also provide potential clients a healthy dose of reality therapy. “We’re very good at presenting customers with a clear picture of what they’re going to go through,” Calvis says. And for those seeking an intensely personalized $1 million-plus custom home, the investment of time and energy can be considerable. “Anybody can give them a house,” Calvis says. ‘They come to us for the whole experience.”

But customers lacking the patience for a custom home are not shown the door. Calvis Wyant builds fully half its houses on spec, so clients with something quicker and easier in mind have an appealing alternative. “Originally we thought the spec houses would bring us a lot of build-to-suit business,” Calvis says, ‘but it’s been the other way around.”

Those who choose the custom route are treated to a full-court press. An extensive design questionnaire explores their dreams and expectations for a new home. The company’s design center is staffed by a full-time coordinator who can turn a vacation photo of a French-chateau fireplace into the real thing by orchestrating the design, locating the appropriate materials, and lining up artisans to do the work. “Anything you want, we’ll do,” Calvis says.

Calvis credits partner and chief designer Gary Wyant’s knack for dreaming up houses that “make sense, but have that sense of style and drama that you want in a custom home.” Wyant’s gift, Calvis says, is his ability to listen to the client, “or more important, to read between the lines of what the client is saying.”

But what about those two projects that fizzled before going to contract? “One was an illness and the other a divorce,” Calvis says. And losing the latter job turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After the divorce, both partners returned to Calvis Wyant independently for their own design/build projects – Bruce D. Snider

Calvis Wyant Luxury Homes, Scottsdale, Ariz. Type of business: design/build, custom, and spec builder; Years in business: 15; Employees: 17; 2000 volume: $21 million; 2000 starts: 15

Kathy and Rick Harwick

Ranging upwards of 10,000 square feet and running $3 million and more, the houses Kathy and Rick Harwick build are not designed on the back of a napkin. Rick reports that a project requiring 20 pages of architectural drawings will often get an additional 40 from his interior designer. All those lines on paper represent a lot of decisions by owners, architects, and designers — and a lot of diplomacy and leadership from the Harwicks — before the first spadeful of dirt is turned over.

In the course of building more than 100 high-end homes, the Harwicks have assembled a highly skilled team of designers to handle architecture, landscape and hardscape, interiors, lighting, and lighting controls. Working either as independent operators or on the staff of other firms, the designers come together as a tightly coordinated unit under Rick’s direction — no small achievement for creative people accustomed to having their own way. On the Harwicks’ projects design is a collaborative process, in which colleagues feel free to improve on each other’s contribution. In the shared pursuit of excellence, Rick says, “Nobody gets offended.”

Part of this congeniality may be due to the fact that, whatever the design calls for, no matter how detailed or difficult, the Harwicks can marshal the resources to do it justice. Here, again, Rick credits the company’s long-time associates, in this case a stable of subcontractors that have kept pace with the Harwicks through the years as their jobs have grown in size and complexity. In Florida’s notoriously transient labor market, Rick says, “We were very fortunate, because we got hooked up with good people early and they just stayed with us. As we’ve grown, they’ve grown. We’ve pushed the envelope, and they’ve come along with us.”

One trade — painting — never produced a dependable ally. “It’s probably the most abused trade, and it’s one of the most important,” says Rick. So rather than lower their standards, the Harwicks solved the shortage of first-class painting companies by founding their own, which now employs some 20 painters.

In orchestrating both design and construction, Rick claims that his company’s work consists mostly of “putting the right people with the right customer.” If so, it seems clear that first among the right people are Rick and Kathy Harwick.

Harwick Homes Construction, Naples, Fla. Type of business: custom builder; Years in business: 14; Employees: 15; 2000 volume: $25.4 million; 2000 starts: 12

Greg W. Hurd

You won’t hear Greg Hurd grumbling about architects. He loves being involved in the design process, and he’s made sure the architects he works with are on his wavelength. That doesn’t mean he expects them to dumb down the design to make a house easier and cheaper to build. He welcomes the challenge of building a well-conceived and finely detailed house.

Hurd’s role is pivotal in the creative process; on each house he plays matchmaker, interpreter, and executor. He’s carefully chosen a short list of architects in the Austin market that he “clicks” with to design the houses he builds. Some of them are, like him, California transplants who’ve brought a fresh West Coast vision to the Texas capital. Based on a variety of factors, including personality, style, and fee structure, he matches clients who come to him with one of the architects on his list.

This is when the fun begins for Hurd. He stays completely involved in the design phase, attending every design meeting to make sure the clients get the house they want. Architect Jeff Berkus of Jeffrey Berkus Architects describes the process as a collaboration. Hurd, he says, “encourages design solutions that respond to the site, climate, and client program with an emphasis on creativity.” While this process can demand as many as 90 hours, Hurd sees it as an investment “that ultimately leads to a higher percentage of closed deals and an overall better relationship with the client.” It also leads to projects that have earned his company a reputation for building trendsetting houses.

Sereno Homes, Austin, Texas. Type of business: custom builder; Years in business: 27; Number of employees: 6; 2000 volume: $13 million; 2000 starts: 10