Ask ten builders what a custom home costs and eight will say 'it depends,' which is true, unhelpful, and occasionally a hiding place. It does depend — and you still deserve numbers. Here are ours, stated the way we state them across the table at a first meeting.
In the Alder Bay region, in 2026, architect-led custom construction is running roughly $520 to $780 per square foot — construction alone. Complex sites, extensive glazing or hand craft push past that; Solana Point did, and we said so before its design began. Serious whole-house renovation runs $280 to $450 per square foot, plus the discovery work that tells you which end of that range your particular old house is going to vote for.
Why per-square-foot is a blunt instrument
Two 4,000-square-foot houses can differ by a million dollars, honestly, with nobody padding anything. A square foot of glass wall costs multiples of a square foot of framed wall. A hillside foundation can cost what a flat lot's entire shell costs. Twelve corners cost more than four.
So use per-foot numbers the way estimators do: as a sanity check, not a promise. If a builder quotes you a confident single number before design exists, you have learned something important about the builder, and nothing at all about your house.
The three budgets
Families budget one number. Projects spend three. Naming all three at the start is most of what 'budget honesty' means:
- Land & site
- The lot, plus what the lot demands: well, septic, utility runs, driveways, retaining, geotech. On rural and hillside sites this is routinely 15–25% of the total — and it's the number buyers most often forget while falling in love with a view.
- Construction
- The building itself — the per-square-foot conversation above, plus landscape and outbuildings if they're real to you (they're usually real).
- Everything else
- Design and engineering (with us, a stated 4–6% of construction), permits, furniture, window coverings, escalation between signing and start, and a contingency you genuinely don't touch — 5% on new builds, 10–15% on renovations.
Allowances, honestly
An allowance is a placeholder for a decision you haven't made yet — 'we've carried $X for tile.' Reasonable in moderation. Ruinous as a sales tactic: a bid stuffed with teaser allowances is a low number that cannot survive contact with your actual taste, and its author knows that.
Our rule: by 90% documents, allowances are set from selections you've already made with our selections lead, at real quoted prices. It's why the spread between our contracts and our final invoices has averaged under five percent for a decade. When you compare builders, ask each one for their allowance schedule and their last five projects' contract-to-final spread. The silence is data.
What actually moves a budget
In order, in our experience: the site you buy, the glazing ratio, kitchens and baths (it's the density of trades, not the faucets), hand craft like plaster and masonry, and lastly — far behind the others — the finishes everyone worries about most. Move early, decide early: a decision made in design costs a pencil line; the same decision mid-build costs a change order and three weeks.
None of this is meant to talk you out of ambition. Solana Point kept its cantilever and Fenwick Lane kept its ninety-year-old windows because the money was told the truth early enough to plan for it. That's the entire method: the budget isn't the enemy of the dream — surprise is.