5 Ways to Reduce Costs on Your Custom Home with Modern Home Design

Using modern home design when building a custom home often helps reduce costs during the home building process. We can use many minimalist forms that look great in a modern contemporary style and don’t cost as much as their traditional counterparts.

One approach we like to use is to install inexpensive electrical conduit as sleek metal stair railing as opposed to using pricy stained wood. We also suggest choosing timeless chrome faucets that you can keep for years as opposed to selecting something trendy like a gold finish that’s all the rage right now (and may soon beg for replacement).

Here are five other ways to reduce costs on a custom home through modern home design:

1. Don’t be afraid of concrete. Many of the contemporary homes that we build today use concrete to some degree in the finished floor. Especially in homes with concrete used for thermal massing, we can polish and stain the concrete floor to create a great, clean contemporary look with a durable finish without a lot of expense.

2. Allow less to be more. Modern home design embodies minimalist spaces. A blank wall with a large window that frames a beautiful view is a perfectly acceptable finish, and our homeowners often want it that way. The alternative in a traditional home design would be to not allow the wall to be blank, but to add expensive, ornate woodwork or other pricy features to dress it up.

3. Embrace monochrome. The eye tends to gloss over things that are the same and notice things that are different. When we paint baseboards the same color and sheen as the walls, the boring trim tends to vanish, and the eye picks up on the details in your home that you want to be noticed. This also reduces costs on painting labor – walls and trim can be painted all at once instead of requiring masking, caulking, and other labor-intensive activities involved in painting them separately.

4. Open the door to flat panels. We find homeowners tend to like to spend money on interior doors with lots of ornate panels. At several hundred dollars per door, the cost can add up quickly when you think of all the doors that are in your home. Choosing flat-panel doors instead reduces the cost of each door, plus gives you a modern home design accent. Think of it as a blank canvas that’s ready to adorn with a beautiful handle that fits your style and catches the eye.

5. Stain wood selectively. While we’re talking about doors, the traditional thinking is usually that stained doors require high-end stained wood casings and trim to match. In a number of the homes we have constructed using a modern home design, we painted the baseboards and casings and just stained the door. The stained woodwork pops from the wall and becomes a design element in the room, plus it reduces costs when we don’t need to use stain-grade trim.

We have many other tricks up our sleeves using modern home design to help reduce costs during the construction of your custom home. Let us know if that’s your goal and we’ll offer recommendations throughout the building process.