Having the Right Stuff

Fact: high end residential defects often don’t even pass lower standards of workmanship. To be sure, the more complex and sophisticated finishes, fixtures, and design programs, the higher the rate of defects in the installed works. That’s because the quality bar for luxury is exponentially higher than it is for plain vanilla white boxes. Given the dearth of skilled labor in a bull luxury market, I fear we are embarking on an epic trail of patent and latent defects that may never be equaled.

The first way to reduce an industry wide glut of so called luxury developers and contractors is for those who lack the ‘right stuff’ to not enter the high end residential market in the first place – good luck! Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen any time soon. But eventually, when the market cools, the pretenders will retake their proper and humble position as schlock and crock builders, and cut loose from the top down.

Professional luxury builders have established track records of delivering quality on time and budget. They both comprehend and respect the subtleties, nuances, and characteristics of high end residential project delivery – none of which do the charlatans now flooding the market bother to acknowledge or follow.

Owners, stakeholders, developers, or other entities with a high end residential project to execute are in the best position to corral an unregulated market that allows for transgresses beyond any fancy of the imagination. This they do in the qualification progress: portfolios, references, walk-throughs, interviews with project teams, and other background that will speak to their experience and ability.

Yet, many of those seeking to buy luxury are, in fact, not willing to pay for it, despite having the money. They value-engineer, beat-down, and buy-around their contractors while expecting to buy the same quality of project delivery: in a word, ‘something for nothing. Such inequity is toxic to any building contract, and a sure recipe for conflict. Contract inequity is especially fatal to high end residential, where all defects and flaws are magnified higher than most any building project..

Just like contractors, high end residential work demands that designers should be held to at least the same scrutiny as contractors  Yet, they seldom are. Some of the misunderstanding stems from the fact that designers work in the virtual world -contractors in the real world. Other conflicts develop for the same reason that plague contractors: insufficient design budgets that don’t allow enough resources for managing the design through the fit-out.

Yet, the advantage is with the high end residential design industry, which pretends to occupy the moral high ground – better educated, and less dishonest than their contractor counterparts. They typically have their clients’ ear and vote of confidence well before it is earned or deserved, and long before a contractor is selected. Contractors always sense such arrogance, to complete the vicious cycle of us against them.

High end residential clients who can’t make up their mind, or keep changing it, are anathema to both the design and building industries – their own worst enemy. They miss the point that their indecision and capriciousness can have a debilitating, drag down, effect on their project. It doesn’t seem to come to their attention until their project budget spirals out of control, and schedule becomes blasted.

This is to be expected from lay-people. But clients don’t have to be that way – they can and should educate themselves with solid facts before they begin making some of the biggest monetary decisions in their lifetime. As the schmatta Moe Ginsburg always said – “an educated consumer is your best buyer” – true dat!  – they know what they want, how much they can afford, and most important, they understand the nature of building contracts, their negotiation and execution.

‘Cortisol is a killer. We’ve known that for a long time. Than why do so many seem to relish and deliberately seek out leverage imbalanced and dictatorial belligerent positions that utterly guarantee a hormonal shit show.

Compare this educated consumer to the arrogant, relentlessly demanding, and implacable parvenu who feels entitled to play the angry despot whose wrath inspires fear and loathing. ‘Who do you suppose is going to get the better quality product?’ And more importantly, ‘who is going to be subject to a miserably prolonged, contentious experience that seeming grays hair and shortens lifespans?’

‘Unsophisticated owners set the stage for tragedy by having unreasonable, even bizarre expectations. Where they get them I haven’t the foggiest notion.

Ultimately, for all the hawkish negotiations and tough posturing intended to win the day, their hard-nose, dig your feet in obstinacy, invariably and ironically end up costing themselves more money, and far more heartache than had they had bargained for – accepted the original budget in the first place. Some of this behavior stems from ignorance, where as others know exactly what they are doing – and damn the torpedoes. Until tomorrow, when the jig is up, and the project is buggered beyond repair.

‘If educated consumers are the best customers, than their counterparts must be malcontent and feckless laypeople.

Finally, in traditional high end residential owner-contractor agreements (AIA family), where the architect is the ‘Agent,’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) of the owner, it’s almost futile to attempt to assign all the blame to a single party. In all likelihood, everyone owns shares in the losing triumvirate.

High end residential Rules to Live By

• Spending too much money on labor and materials never guarantees any degree of quality – it only guarantees one will spend too much money.
• You can’t mix and match quality materials and product with inferior designers and contractors, and ignorant and arrogant clients . One bad apple can spoil the lot.
• If clients approach and coordinate their investments with tyrannical malevolence, it won’t matter how good the design and build team are – it will be a loser.
• Those who have no right to dwell in the high end residential market will not find sympathy when they inevitably fail. High end residential does not suffer fools gladly.
• Be specific. Very specific, about contractual partys’ responsibilities and expectations. To those unfamiliar with the tolerances and guidelines of high end residential, there’s too wide a gray area of quality assessment to rely on future mock-ups. Without control samples, finishes are ultimately arbitrary.
• Good reputations can’t be bought. This is especially so in high end residential – they are meritocratic –  a factor of past and present performance. Bad reputations speak loudest. Don’t be the fool who neglected to vet the reputation of those he or she intends to do business with.
• Owner’s reps sticking their beak into the high end residential industry are intended to pick up the slack of the impotent de facto agency of the designer. They are agents of turmoil and disaster, adding a completely unnecessary premium to already costly budgets. There’s no compelling reason to hire one without the requisite industry experience -and I’ve yet to see a single one who had it.