Doing It For Themselves

I look at tons of homes, and I’m not complaining. Even before I began making my living writing about real estate, there were many times I fell for the siren song of an open house on a lazy Sunday. Sometimes, while on vacation, I’ll slip a few homes onto the agenda-- you know, just in case I should someday find myself leaving the Bay Area.

One of the drawers of my office desk is crammed full of open house flyers collected in recent months. Once a year, I throw them out – to make room for more.

When you look at as many homes as I do, you begin to notice things. A few years ago, green granite counters suddenly disappeared from remodeled kitchens. They were replaced by CaesarStone. Built-in speakers for surround sound, once the exclusive domain of Hillsborough and Atherton’s high end, now appear in many homes priced at or around $1 million. Same with solar panels. As “green” goes mainstream, its price falls.

One of the more interesting phenomena I’ve noticed during my years as a real estate junkie is that of the contractor-built-and-owned home. A surprising (to me, at least) number of middle-high to high-end homes are built by contractors not on spec but as homes for themselves and their families. How they interpret the needs not of some imaginary buyer but of their own families can make for some inventive – and unusual – finished products.

Last weekend, I saw a beautiful Easton Addition home, built by a local contractor and his realtor wife. Throughout the home, it seemed, every time I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” I’d turn around to find that very thing.

If you spent enough of your leisure time in the garage to warrant building a nice, large workshop, for example, wouldn’t you want surround sound out there, too? And a half-bath? If you had a large family, wouldn’t a big, comfortable great room be more important than an enormous, imposing living room? Even cleaned up and ready to sell, this house radiated warmth: it had been built with real people in mind.

Sometimes, the contractor-owner paradigm translates to unusual living spaces, evidence of a mindset that strives to maximize square footage, however odd the results might be. I remember a place in San Mateo with a strange loft overlooking its master bedroom. Access was by ladder. The stagers had stuck a desk and chair up there, maybe after rubbing their chins in frustration for several minutes, and after realizing they couldn’t dress the thing up as a gym, since the ceiling was only about five feet.

There was a place east of El Camino Real whose added second-floor master suite was one gigantic room. At least 600 square feet of open space, it had an office along one wall, a California King in the middle and an elliptical machine in one corner. Another San Mateo house had a beautiful, huge eat-in kitchen…with a second oven located in the laundry room.

A home in San Francisco had dismissed the idea of formal entertaining altogether, placing the kitchen downstairs next to the family room, while the living and dining rooms hung out upstairs, alone and foodless. “We throw a lot of end-of-the-season little league parties,” the owner-contractor-active little league parent told me.

In general, if there has to be an “in general,” the quality of homes built by contractors for their families is stellar, but the design and layout is often very personal-- more so than you’ll find in spec houses, of course, but also more so than you’ll find from sellers who are not contractors.

Another caveat: sometimes, when a contractor has done major renovations for himself on an existing home, work may have been done without permits. This is fine according to the spirit of the law – permits are designed to protect consumers from sub-standard work – but could put you at the mercy of the local building permit department, should you decide to do more work in the future.

If you want to see the best a contractor-owner home has to offer, head over to 1136 Cortez Ave. and check out the craftsman local contractor Steve Johnson built in 2004. It’s the home I mentioned above, where the builder seems to have thought of every practical need that might arise in the day-to-day life of a family, while also staying universal enough to appeal to the broad spectrum of buyers now tromping through it at each Sunday open house. Why is Johnson moving? To start on the next project, of course.