Custom Homes · Coast to Coast
The house your family will still be coming home to in forty years
We don't adapt a plan to fit your lot. We design the house around the particular people who'll live in it, with one architect leading the project from the first conversation through the final walk-through, interiors drawn in the same room as the architecture, and Nathan traveling to you for the meetings that deserve to happen in person.
What You Are Actually Building
Most of our clients aren't building a house. They're building the place everyone comes back to.
By the time someone can build at this level, the house is rarely about shelter and almost never about square footage. It's the visible result of a working life, of decades of decisions that mostly went right and a long run of years where the easier choice was sitting right there and you didn't take it. A house is where all of that finally becomes something you can hand to somebody.
Which means the questions that matter aren't the ones a plan set knows to ask. Where does everyone sit at Thanksgiving when there are nineteen of you and four are under six? Can your daughter stay a full week with her own kids without anyone feeling like a guest? Where does the piano go, and will the room hold the sound? When your parents can no longer manage stairs, is there a place for them that doesn't feel like a concession? What happens on this porch in October?
A catalog can't answer any of that, and that isn't a failing of the catalog. Those plans were drawn for the average of a thousand families, and nobody is the average of a thousand families. You'd get a good house, and your family would spend years adapting to it. We're interested in the other thing, a home shaped so closely around the people living in it that from the first week it feels like it was always there.
Forty years from now, nobody in your family will remember what the design fee was. They'll remember which room everyone always ended up in, and whether the house felt like it was built for them. That's the real argument for doing this properly, and it's a better one than anything further down this page.
What Makes This Different
Most of what gets sold as custom design is a plan with your name on it
There is a whole industry built on selling house plans, and at a glance the economics look appealing. A set arrives quickly, it costs a fraction of what an architect charges, and it comes with renderings of a beautiful home. What it doesn't come with is your lot, your orientation, your views, your coastal wind and flood requirements, your association's design rules, or any understanding of how your family actually lives. Those questions don't disappear because nobody asked them, they just get answered later, by a builder, while the work is already in his hands.
That's how a thin set of drawings turns into an expensive house. The gaps get priced as allowances, the allowances get exceeded, and the owner covers the difference at retail, mid-construction, under time pressure. Nobody behaved badly here. The documents simply didn't say enough, and a contract that doesn't say enough always resolves in favor of the party holding the pencil.
We work the other way around, designing one house for one family on one piece of land and documenting it thoroughly enough that your builder prices your actual home instead of estimating around the parts nobody settled. At two million dollars and up, the difference between those two approaches isn't a line item on a proposal. It's the difference between the house you agreed to and the house you end up paying for.
How We Work
One architect leading it, and one set of drawings everything answers to
Nathan leads your project himself from the first conversation to the final walk-through, and architecture, interior design and construction coordination all sit under one roof. That means one person who knows the whole project, who you can reach directly, and who's physically standing in your house when you can't be. You stay in the decisions that shape how you'll live. We carry everything else.
Nathan leads your project himself
This isn't a principal who appears at the first meeting and then hands you off to staff. Nathan designs your house, draws it, sits in the meetings, and answers the phone when you call. One person holds the whole project in their head, and you'll always know who that is. For a house at this level the difference shows up in the details nobody delegated.
Architecture and interiors decided together
Interior design sits in house here, so the millwork, the lighting, the stone, the plumbing and the furniture get resolved in the same set of drawings as the architecture. Rooms designed this way hold together, because the proportions and the finishes were decided by the same people in the same conversation rather than by three firms working in sequence.
You will walk through the house before it exists
We model your home and take you through it at full scale, room by room, on our virtual platform. You'll see how the light falls in the kitchen in the afternoon, how the hallway feels, and whether the ceiling in the great room is right. Clients change their minds in that model constantly, which is exactly where changing your mind is free.
Nathan comes to you
For the meetings that matter, he travels to you rather than asking you to fly to us. There's a great deal we learn sitting in the home you live in now: what you love, what you've outgrown, which rooms you actually use, how your art and your furniture want to live. That visit shapes the design more than any questionnaire could.
Drawings complete enough that nobody has to guess
Our construction sets run to roughly a hundred sheets. Every connection, every waterproofing condition, every interior elevation, every floor transition. A builder pricing that set is pricing your actual house rather than filling the gaps with allowances and resolving them later at your expense. This is the single largest reason our projects land where they were priced.
We stay on through construction
We review what the builder submits, certify the pay applications, observe the work, and rule on change order requests before they reach you. Somebody who answers to you is on your site rather than only the builder's own team. You'll hear what happened from us, with context and a recommendation, instead of piecing it together afterward.
The Process
Six phases, and you'll always know which one you're in
A custom home is a long undertaking, and most of the anxiety people carry through it comes from not knowing what happens next or what's being decided on their behalf. We run the same sequence on every project and we tell you where you are in it at all times.
We come see you, and we look at the land
The first working session happens in the home you live in now. We talk through how you actually use a house, what your days look like, what you entertain for, and what you've been putting up with. Then we study the site: the views, the orientation, the setbacks, the flood and wind requirements, the association rules. If you haven't bought the lot yet, this is the best possible time to involve us.
Concept, in three dimensions from the start
We design in a model rather than in flat plans, so the first thing you see is the house, not a floor plan you have to translate. We'll walk you through several directions, and you'll react to spaces rather than to line work. This phase is deliberately loose. Moving a wall here costs an afternoon.
Design development, with the interiors in the room
The house gets resolved in detail: ceiling treatments, millwork, stone, tile, lighting, hardware, appliances, plumbing. Our interior designers work on your project alongside the architecture rather than after it, so the kitchen gets designed once with everything decided rather than twice with a gap in the middle.
Construction documents, drawn to be built from
This is where our fee goes, and where it earns its keep. We document every condition, coordinate structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, civil and landscape into one set, and specify materials by name rather than by allowance. The goal is a set that answers the builder's questions before he asks them.
Pricing, while changing your mind is still cheap
We price the project with a contractor or a third-party estimator at every stage rather than handing a finished set to one bidder at the end. If the number comes back higher than you wanted, you still have every lever available: square footage, finish level, roofing, systems. That choice only exists before construction starts.
Construction administration, through the final walk-through
Site observation, submittal review, pay application certification under AIA G702 and G703, and authority over change orders. Most firms end at permit. The part that protects everything you just paid us to document is the part that happens after the trucks arrive, and we don't leave before it's finished.
Your Other Options
We're not the right choice for every house
There are four realistic ways to get a custom home designed and three of them aren't us. Each one is genuinely correct for a particular kind of project, and the most expensive mistake people make is hiring the wrong category rather than the wrong firm. If we were sitting on your side of the table, this is how we'd weigh them.
The builder who designs in house
A local design-build firm, usually a contractor with a designer or a drafter on staff. One contract, one phone number, design and construction bundled into a single price.
Right for
Efficient when the house is straightforward, the lot is easy, and you already know and trust the builder. You skip the handoff between two firms, decisions move quickly, and you are never caught between an architect and a contractor pointing at each other. For a great many projects this is the right call, and if it's right for yours we'll say so.
Harder when
The designer works for the builder. When a question comes up about whether something was included in the price, the person answering it reports to the person being asked about. Nobody in that room is independently yours. The drawings also tend to stop at the minimum the builder needs, because to them more drawing is cost rather than value, and every question a set leaves open gets answered later by the party doing the pricing.
The residential or home designer
Someone who draws houses without an architecture license, which is legal for most residential work in most states, frequently working from a library of existing plans modified to suit.
Right for
The right economics for a simpler house. A clear lot, a familiar layout, conventional structure, and a budget where the design fee genuinely matters as a percentage of the whole. Good houses get built this way every year. Paying full architectural fees for a straightforward home on an easy site isn't a virtue, it's just a larger invoice.
Harder when
Complexity is where it strains. Coastal wind and flood requirements, a difficult site, long structural spans, integrated systems, custom millwork, a design review board that has to be persuaded. A plan from a library also answers questions for a house that isn't yours and a lot you don't own, so the unanswered parts arrive as allowances, and allowances are where budgets come apart.
The national or production homebuilder
A large builder working from a plan library, with a design center where you choose finishes from curated tiers and a contractual delivery date.
Right for
Very hard to beat on certainty. A known price, a date, a warranty, financing often under the same roof, and a product refined over thousands of houses. If what you want is a well-built home on a predictable schedule without the process consuming a year of your attention, this is a rational and somewhat underrated choice.
Harder when
It's a product rather than a design. The plan library exists because repetition is what makes the price work, and the finish tiers exist because those are the items the builder buys in volume. A design center is a selection process, not a design process. Above two million dollars, specificity is most of what you are paying for, and specificity is the one thing a production model structurally can't sell you.
Where we fit
We're the right call when the house has to be specific. A difficult or a beautiful site that deserves an actual response. Coastal wind, flood and storm requirements that change the structure rather than decorate it. A review board that has to be convinced. Interiors and architecture that need to be resolved in the same conversation instead of in sequence. A budget large enough that the cost of leaving things ambiguous dwarfs the cost of settling them on paper first.
When that's the project, the design fee is the smallest number in the conversation and the one with the most leverage over every other number on the page. When it isn't, one of the three above will serve you better and cost you less, and we'd rather tell you that on the first call than take the work.
Where We Work
Wherever the land is, we'll come to it
Much of our work sits on the water, and coastal building carries requirements that inland design never has to answer: wind loads, flood elevations, salt exposure, hurricane and storm detailing, and association review boards with real teeth. We've been designing to those standards for years. The coastline changes from one project to the next, but the discipline doesn't.
New England & the Northeast
Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, the Hamptons, Cape Cod, Newport, Greenwich
The Mid-Atlantic
Annapolis, the Eastern Shore, Rehoboth Beach, Avalon, Stone Harbor
The Carolinas
Kiawah Island, Charleston, Isle of Palms, Figure Eight Island, Bald Head Island
The Lowcountry & Northeast Florida
Sea Island, St. Simons, Amelia Island, Ponte Vedra Beach
Florida's Coasts
Palm Beach, Jupiter, Naples, Boca Grande, Sarasota, 30A
The Gulf Coast
Rosemary Beach, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Pass Christian, Galveston
Not on this list? We travel for the work and we hold an NCARB certificate, which is what allows an architect to practice across state lines. Tell us where your land is and we'll tell you straight away how we'd handle it.
What White Glove Actually Means
Fewer decisions landing on you, and none of them landing as a surprise
The phrase gets used loosely, so it's worth being specific. You won't be the one chasing an engineer for a drawing, reconciling a lighting schedule against a cabinet elevation, or deciding whether a submittal matches what was specified, because those are our problems rather than yours. We hold the consultants, we coordinate the disciplines, and we bring you the decisions that genuinely require you rather than the ones that only require somebody.
When something does need you, it arrives with context, options and a recommendation, rather than as a confusing phone call from a job site or a question you have no real basis to answer. You should be making choices about how your home looks and how it'll feel to live in, and almost never about how it gets built.
It also means a fee you can plan around. We scope to your project and quote a fixed figure rather than a percentage that drifts upward as the house grows. Changes to our own agreement appear as separate numbered lines, and we never revise the original phase fees. You'll always be able to see exactly what you agreed to.
And it means we're still there at the end. Construction administration runs through the final walk-through, because a thoroughly documented house only pays off if somebody is holding the builder to the documents. A firm that hands you a set and disappears has sold you the expensive half of the service and skipped the half that protects it.
The Budget
The number you are quoted and the number you pay are different numbers, and the gap has a name
When drawings don't specify something, a builder can't price it, so he carries an allowance instead: a placeholder figure standing in for a decision nobody has made yet, fifteen thousand for lighting, forty for the kitchen. The bid adds up and it looks competitive. What it actually amounts to is a budget with blanks in it, and the blanks get filled in later by the party holding the work.
These aren't rounding errors. Interior finishes alone account for roughly a quarter of what it costs to build a house, 24.1% by the National Association of Home Builders' most recent accounting, and finishes are precisely the category allowances govern. On a three million dollar build that puts something close to seven hundred thousand dollars behind placeholder numbers, and on a home at this level it's likely more, because finishes are where a custom house departs most from an ordinary one.
The part nobody raises at signing is who ends up carrying the risk. When the documents specify everything, the burden to perform sits entirely with the contractor who priced them. When they don't, a share of it transfers to you, and you're the least equipped party in the arrangement to carry it. You'd be selecting finishes you've never specified before, against budgets somebody else wrote, under time pressure, while the job waits on your answer.
So we write it out instead. We specify materials by name rather than by dollar figure, our construction documents run to roughly a hundred sheets, and we price the project with a contractor or a third-party estimator at every stage of design rather than taking a single bid at the end. If a number comes back higher than you wanted, every lever is still available to you: square footage, finish level, systems, roofing. That choice only exists while the house is still on a screen. Afterward the same change costs you the work already standing, the work somebody has to take apart to reach it, and the days the whole job sits still waiting on an answer.
None of which is about building a cheaper house. Plenty of our clients see the figure, decide they want what they want, and spend it. It's about seeing the real number while you can still do something about it.
The Consultation
Start the conversation from wherever you are
The first conversation is a call, it's private, and there's no obligation attached to it. We'll talk about the home you're picturing, the land you have or are considering, your timeline, and what you've already been told by anyone else.
If you've got the lot, we'll look at it with you. If you don't, we'll tell you what to look for and what to walk away from. Either way you'll leave the call with a clear picture of what this would involve, and an honest read on whether we're the right firm for it.
Selected Homes
A few of the houses we have designed
What It Feels Like
Years from now the grandchildren will argue over who gets which room at Christmas.
That's what we're really building. You'll walk in on the first day and nothing will surprise you, because you've already stood in every room. Then the house gets on with its actual job, which is being the place your family measures the years against.
Client Reviews
In their words
After a year of wasted time with a different architectural firm, I was directed to Aleskovsky. Since then, the stress and tension of the design process has gone away. When they showed me the first rendering of my future home, I was blown away. I highly recommend the team to anyone.
We never envisioned what could be done, but Nathan believed he could transform this home into our dream home, and he did just that. Everyone who walks into our home is in awe. It has become our dream home.
At our very first meeting, we knew this was the firm who would bring our dream to fruition and design something more than we could ever imagine. They listened, and were professional, personable, and super knowledgeable.
It was a pleasure to work with the team from start to finish. I truly appreciated the professionalism, openness, and transparency throughout the project. The flexibility and non-pressured environment made the experience exceptional.
Common Questions
What clients ask us first
Yes, and a growing share of our work is exactly that. Nathan holds his NCARB certificate, the credential that lets an architect practice across state lines, and we structure every out-of-area project so you get the same principal involvement and the same construction oversight a local client would. We'll confirm the particulars for your jurisdiction in the first conversation so nobody is guessing.
A plan you can buy is a house somebody else already designed, for somebody else's land and somebody else's life. It arrives with the hard questions unanswered, which is why plan sets lean so heavily on allowances, and allowances are where budgets go sideways. We design one house, for your site and your family, and we document it thoroughly enough that your builder is pricing the actual home rather than estimating around gaps. At this level, the cost of getting that wrong dwarfs the difference in design fee.
Most of them happen on our virtual platform, where we share the model and walk through your house together in 3D while we talk. You can stand in the kitchen, look down the hallway, and judge the proportions in a way drawings never quite deliver. For the milestones, Nathan flies to you. We set the rhythm around your schedule rather than ours, and you'll never be waiting on us to tell you where things stand.
He travels. The initial working session happens in your current home whenever that's practical, and Nathan returns for the design presentations that deserve to happen in person. During construction we're on your site on a schedule we agree to up front, rather than on an as-needed basis you have to ask for. Travel is built into the fee rather than invoiced back to you as a surprise.
It works well, and we prefer it to being asked to recommend one blind. We're not design-build and we have no financial relationship with any contractor, which means when we review a change order request we are reviewing it on your behalf and nothing else. Bring us your builder and we will bring them into the process early, where their pricing input is worth the most.
We do, in house, as part of the same project. Millwork, lighting, finishes, plumbing fixtures, appliances and FF&E get specified in the same documents as the architecture. Most firms treat interiors as a separate engagement or hand them off entirely, and the seam shows. A house where the architecture and the interiors got decided by different people in different months tends to read like a collection of good decisions rather than one coherent home.
Design and documentation typically run eight to twelve months depending on the size and complexity of the house, and construction usually adds another twelve to eighteen. If you have a date you need to be in by, tell us in the first conversation and we'll work backward to show you whether it holds. You'll hear an honest answer early rather than a reassuring one that falls apart later.
Every home is different, so we scope the fee to your project rather than quoting a package or a percentage. What stays consistent is that the fee is a fixed, predictable figure set by scope and complexity, it's a fraction of your construction budget, and it's deliberately front loaded. We resolve the expensive questions on paper, where they're inexpensive to solve, rather than in the field where they aren't. We'll walk you through exactly how it works in the consultation.
Tell us about the house
Book a private consultation with Nathan. We'll talk through the land, the house you're picturing, and how we'd approach it from here. No pressure, and no obligation.
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