While anyone with enough money can build their own house, hiccups come when aspiring custom homebuilders need money from the bank. Throw a pandemic into the mix, and that project may end up looking, or costing, like something else entirely.
For couple Marc Manack and Kallisto Vimr, their homebuilding vision came to fruition relatively quickly, in part as a result of those financing factors that often upturn the best-laid plans.
Manack, a co-founder of architecture firm Silo, had designed their Arkansas home: a T-shaped residence illuminated by colorful, smartphone-controlled LED lights. But then it was time to move, and they wanted to try something else, this time in North Carolina.
They secured a property in Charlotte’s Belmont neighborhood through a partial barter with the seller — Manack got a discount on the land in exchange for providing design services for a separate project.
An aging mill house sat on the land but there was no saving the crumbling structure. So, Manack finalized a new design on the urban site that's bound by existing residences, envisioning a structure that stood in contrast to “most of the new-build projects" that have large garages fronting the street within the gentrifying neighborhood.
Instead of these so-called snout houses, named for hulking garages that protrude like a pig’s snout, “we wanted to find a way to create more transparency with the street," such as introducing a series of porches tucked into a steel-wrapped design that nodded to the front porch culture associated with Charlotte’s mill houses, and adding large windows that enable one to "see all the way through the house,” Manack said.
With design priorities set, the couple sold their Arkansas house in 2019 and got ready to break ground. But then the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Building a house with some 'sweat equity'
“We decided to sit for a year and figure out if the world was going to burn down or not,” Manack said. It seemingly didn’t, and Manack and Vimr used conventional new construction financing to secure a loan for their project.
Banks, aiming to safeguard their investments, need to make sure the borrower can complete their proposed project and that it can hold its value. For this project, Manack’s appraiser looked at new builds in the neighborhood and saw more square footage as more valuable in Bellmont.
“Ironically, the banks pushed us to build a bigger house because they wanted to make sure it was something that was comparable to where the neighborhood was going rather than what it actually is,” Manack said, referring to the tension between the area’s existing homes and its new construction. “It’s interesting, once you get a bank involved, how much say-so they can have over what you end up doing.”
For this project, the say-so meant expanding the roughly 1,800-square-foot design by about 600 square feet and including a garage. And with the financing secured, Manack had 12 months to build a 2,400-square-foot house in the middle of a pandemic.
“It was extremely challenging,” he said. But the project broke ground in 2021 and the design team was flexible. “There weren’t a lot of non-negotiables,” Manack said, but they had to pivot in "dramatic ways,” sacrificing some elements and putting in “more sweat equity in order to realize the project.”
Some of that “sweat equity” meant that Manack acted as general contractor, completing some of the building — such as trim, siding and carpentry — with the Silo team. Contractors worked on the more specialized tasks, such as pouring concrete and applying drywall.
The design team also swapped out materials based on availability amid erratic pandemic-era supply chains and relied heavily on materials, such as plywood, available a Home Depot and Lowe’s. Even so, skyrocketing material costs meant the project’s lumber alone ended up costing an estimated $100,000 more than planned.
Designing for the new and the old
Vimr and Manack moved into the residence in 2022. From the outside, the white structure appears “caught between the old and the new,” with its sloping form nodding to the scale of the mill house it replaced. Black-painted wood defines the home’s porches, contrasting with the otherwise bright façade.
Inside, the design team focused on pulling light deep into the home’s interior, creating an airy atmosphere with ample windows and skylights. “There’s something about the way the light works in the spaces that makes it feel very soothing,” Manack said.
Angular ceilings filter the daylight into interesting shapes and shadows, while serving up design drama all their own. In the main living space that contains the living areas and kitchen stretched across polished-concrete floors, roughly 700 1-by-2-inch wood planks cover the ceiling.
The Silo team nailed the individual, white-stained boards into the ceiling one by one. Manack found that the project created its own micro-market, driving up the price of the materials he would come and buy in bulk for certain elements of the project. When they started the interior ceiling, for example, planks at their local supply store were about $2.50. By the time Silo completed the ceiling, the price hit $4.50 each.
When all was said and done, the project ended up costing its owners about $600,000.
“And the lowest bid that I got in 2021 to build the house was $1.2 million,” Manack said. But he estimated he put about $350,000 worth of labor into the build, so “the real cost to a client would be over $1 million … I saved basically 10% or 15% for the design by doing it myself and 20% for the general contractor fee.”
In Charlotte’s Belmont, home prices likely aren’t going down any time soon, with some developers seeing properties in the area as opportunities to turn a quick profit. “Now everything is so expensive,” Manack said.
“Every single house on our side of the street is selling for well over $1 million, and that is forcing new construction to be huge.”