Chicago Tribune Revelation: Women Make The Majority of Design Choices

Last Friday, the Chicago Tribune featured an article revealing the results of an informal survey among custom home builders.   The survey and results?  Women make the majority of the design and selection decisions when building a new custom home.  If that wasn’t obvious enough for you,  the Chicago Cubs have a poor championship-winning record.  Not to be too cynical here but did this really need to be the focus of an article in a major newspaper?

As a former project manager for a custom home builder, I too can attest to this mysterious phenomenon.  In my experience, women definitely take on the majority of the selection processes.  Men certainly have their preferences too but they mostly revolve around having a home office, large basement with a workshop or a large garage with plenty of room for his toys.  This isn’t a huge revelation either but as the Chicago Tribune article states, there usually is some give and take between the sexes when building a house.

The challenge, commitment and gratification of building a new custom home doesn’t only have to be for the uber-wealthy and Orren Pickell Designers & Builders of the world.  There are many custom builders available to people in the market wanting a new home they can design from the ground up.  Builders such as Styczynski Walker and Associates & Architects, William Thomas Homes & Arch Construction Management (all Home Builders of Greater Chicago members), are all Chicago small volume custom builders that are well respected in the industry.

If you structure the building agreement around your control, such as cost plus fee pricing and provide the financing of the construction loan yourself, you can control all the costs associated with your new home.  Assuming you get this far in building your dream home, you can let your wife pick the floorplan, windows, doors, trim profiles, cabinets, paint colors, flooring, appliances plumbing and electrical fixtures, while you happily design the heated 3 car garage with the hydraulic lift.  Just remember that you probably have a budget and that car lift might turn into granite countertops…