Custom home design for Raleigh and the Triangle.

The line between a designer and a render shop is the drawing set. A render sells a feeling. A construction set tells a framer where the beam pocket goes. A custom home engagement here produces both, and the render is generated from the same model the drawings come out of, so what you approve is what gets built.

The standard custom home package covers the whole arc of the design, and every item below is a deliverable rather than a stage you pay for and then talk about:

We work inside the permit path rather than around it. Site plans are formatted for the submittal checklist of the office that will review them, and zoning setbacks, impervious surface limits, tree conservation and HOA architectural review are treated as design constraints from the first sketch rather than as problems discovered at submittal.

That ordering matters most on the constrained lots. A Raleigh infill lot, a Cary HOA with an active architectural review committee and a Chapel Hill lot with slope and tree cover each push the design in a different direction, and all three are cheaper to answer in schematic design than in permit review.

Structural work is stamped by a licensed professional engineer, not by us. Partner structural, civil and energy stamps are coordinated against the drawing set during documentation, so the sheets that carry a stamp and the sheets that do not agree with each other.

You fill out a short intake form, and we reply within two business days with a time to meet. The first design meeting runs about thirty minutes, in person or over video, and a written scope and fixed fee follow within two business days of it.

From there the phases are discovery, programming, schematic, design development, documentation and handoff. Schematic plans and elevations come first, then the exterior and the key interior spaces are rendered in photoreal 3D, so you see the house from the street and standing in the kitchen before a permit is pulled. Selections and approvals run inside the client portal, where every choice ties back to a drawing and a line on the proposal.

Once schematic is locked, the construction set is produced and the engineering stamps are coordinated. If we carry the project through the build, the portal keeps running: weekly photo updates, milestone billing, change orders in real scope language, and a punch list at the final walkthrough. The whole sequence is written out on the client experience page.