Aug 13 2007
Northern California custom woodworking and home design manufacturer Renaissance Old World introduces a "whole house" solution for contractors looking to streamline large custom home building projects.
Builders of larger, high-end homes often find that the pressures between fully duplicating the client's vision -- a client spending high-end money, and coordinating with orders, vendors, employees and installation can be overwhelming. Achieving the desired results with the fewest number of variables is ideal, particularly in the business of luxury homes.
Picture this: a towering 3-story Tuscan-Mediterranean-style home situated square in the middle of 40-acres of beautiful California wine country which, other than the house itself, is given over to grapes cared for by the esteemed Regusci vineyards. A 350-foot driveway imparts a breathtaking excursion through the vineyards to the house, elevated on a 3-acre pad, rendering it imposing beyond its already-considerable dimensions. The entry to the home is almost its own structure, 17-by-17 square and 2 stories high with a 20-foot ceiling, behind which is a slightly higher 24-foot-diameter rotunda incorporating the home's main stairwell. In keeping with the design, the exterior tongue-and-groove under the roof overhangs, the outriggers, and the corbels and molding are all of hand-tooled hardwood in true old-world style.
One of the biggest hurdles on a high-end, customized job -- establishing sources for the project's needed constituents -- can be minimized by simply going with a single source for home design in every room in the house. "We started with Renaissance Old World from day one, when we first looked at the plans," explains Steve Van Dewark of Van Dewark Construction.
Van Dewark says he has not encountered a custom carving and design manufacturer that so truly replicates a true old-world feel -- having seen his share of old-world recreations, he has mostly come across patinas and distressing that were overdone, creating a "fake" look in the final product.
Dealing with a single custom woodworking and design provider for so much of the enterprise eased Van Dewark's burden considerably. "There's tons of benefits," he says. "It makes the job cleaner. Because the exterior items arrived already painted, I have less painters to deal with. And if you're in a hurry and you've got a million things going on in your day and you've got to drop some information, you can pretty much call one person and know that it's being taken care of."
One of the criteria Van Dewark uses to judge a home design vendor is how quickly and how well they rectify any errors. "We've had some stuff that came up that I was unhappy about because I'm a perfectionist," he says. "But with this company, I'll present a problem, and they'll say 'Let's try and fix this. What can we do?' Discussions are easy, nobody gets excited, we work together as a team. That's hard to find in any business."