Ask ten builders what a custom home costs and eight will say 'it depends.' That's true, unhelpful, and sometimes 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 homes are running about $520 to $780 per square foot, for construction alone. Hard sites, lots of glass or hand craft push past that. Solana Point did, and we said so before its design began. A serious whole-house renovation runs $280 to $450 per square foot, plus the discovery work that tells you which end of that range your old house will vote for.
Why per-square-foot is a blunt tool
Two 4,000-square-foot houses can differ by a million dollars, honestly, with nobody padding anything. A square foot of glass wall costs several times a square foot of framed wall. A hillside foundation can cost what a flat lot's whole 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 one confident 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 walls and soils reports. On rural and hillside sites this is often 15 to 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 talk above), plus landscape and outbuildings if they matter to you. They usually do.
- Everything else
- Design and engineering (with us, a stated 4 to 6% of construction), permits, furniture, window coverings, price increases between signing and start, and a contingency you truly don't touch: 5% on new homes, 10 to 15% on renovations.
Allowances, honestly
An allowance is a placeholder for a decision you haven't made yet, as in 'we've carried $X for tile.' That's reasonable in moderation and ruinous as a sales tactic. A bid stuffed with teaser allowances is a low number that can't survive your actual taste, and the person who wrote it 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 our experience, in order: the site you buy, how much glass you want, kitchens and baths (it's the number of trades, not the faucets), hand craft like plaster and masonry, and last, far behind the others, the finishes everyone worries about most. 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 whole method. The budget isn't the enemy of the dream. Surprise is.