Alexa and Phillip Falconer were on vacation in Washington State’s Wenatchee Valley when they saw a stunningly beautiful 40-acre parcel for sale. They worked remotely, lived in Texas, had never built — or even owned — a house, and had dreamed of the Pacific Northwest. They bought it for $125,000 in 2022. This April they finished a custom-designed, two-bedroom modern house on the site for $861,000, exactly on budget.
“I’d always thought that building your own house was only something that really rich people could do,” said Phillip, 33, an accountant. “But we were able to swing it.”
Nancy Keates’s piece in Friday’s Mansion section is the second in a series on building an architect-designed home for less than a million dollars, and it is unusually useful because the Journal printed the actual line items.
The number that made the rest possible
They gave their architects a blank slate. A list of things they hoped for — a sunken living room, lots of windows for views of the boulder-strewn fields — and no requested style or materials at all.
Their architect, Steven Booher of Syndicate Smith, says that is what made the project work: “It can be really easy for clients to get off track and make micro decisions.” Every micro decision in a custom build is a change order, and change orders are where budgets die.
The design followed from constraints rather than fighting them. Booher spent a long time finding a spot with the fewest boulders and a flat area, because building on a slope adds retaining walls and cantilever supports. Two floors rather than one, because “the more you spread out, the more expensive it gets.” Decks left uncovered, because roof overhangs are expensive. Windows large but not floor-to-ceiling, which saved glass and, Booher argues, produced better views: “Limiting the ability to see it all at once makes it more dramatic. It’s using the glass wisely.”
The sunken living room is three feet lower than the other rooms, so its ceilings appear higher without the additional drywall that taller ceilings normally require. When wooden ceilings on both floors got too expensive, they used them only downstairs — and saved about 30% on the wood by buying straight from a local mill and having the contractor stain it.
The trade-offs, named
The Falconers wanted metal on the exterior for fire protection. Booher originally wanted zinc panels, which develop a patina; they priced at $175,000. He pivoted to corrugated metal, turning the panels horizontally and vertically in different places to mimic the zinc look, at half the cost. “The trick is to not get your heart set on a specific material or look,” he said, “as long as you can achieve the same feeling with an alternative.”
They skipped a professional landscaper and are doing the grounds themselves. And Alexa gave up the $15,000 stone bathtub she had fallen for in a Seattle shop, because it was too big for the space and customizing it would have cost more still. “Next house, if we do it again,” she said.
The costs, as printed: site construction $84,625; concrete $21,774; wood and plastics $88,718; doors and windows $40,667; finishes $84,036; mechanical $55,238.
Our read
Three things in this story are worth stealing, and none of them is about architecture.
They fixed the price before the work started. They found a contractor willing to agree a final price in advance, with a $90,000 contingency in case they hit rock when preparing the site. They didn’t hit rock, so they didn’t spend it. A fixed price with a named, quantified contingency is a completely different financial instrument from a cost-plus arrangement with a friendly estimate, and most people discover the difference in month seven.
They decided in advance which decisions they would not make. The blank slate wasn’t indifference; it was a deliberate delegation that removed hundreds of opportunities to spend a little more. This is the same mechanism as automatic contributions to a retirement plan: the value is not the decision, it is the elimination of a recurring decision.
They knew which single item was worth losing. The $15,000 bathtub was the sacrifice, it was identified, and it was given up on purpose. A budget that never names what it is giving up isn’t a budget; it is a hope with a spreadsheet attached.
They have since moved to a rental near Seattle and want to build again, keeping the Waterville house for weekends. “We had a good time building this,” said Phillip. “It was fun.” That is not a sentence most people say after a custom build, and the reason is in the paragraph about the contractor.