Custom home design that starts at plan stage, not at the colour appointment

The interior lives in the plan, not on top of it

Search custom home design and you will mostly find builders showing you floor plans and facades. Those pages are useful for choosing who pours the slab. They skip the decisions that decide how the house actually lives.

Where the fridge sits relative to the island. Whether the bed wall is long enough to take a bedhead and two tables. Whether the hallway clears the artwork you already own. Every one of those is a dimension, and dimensions belong on the preliminary drawings. Tammy marks up those drawings before they go to working drawings, while a change still costs a redraw and nothing else.

What a change costs depends on when you ask for it

Move a window at preliminary plans and you pay for a redraw. Move the same window after you sign the build contract and you pay a variation. Move it after frame stage and you pay the variation plus the rework, and you wear the delay.

There is a second cost most people miss. Builders carry prime cost and provisional sum allowances for tiling, tapware, lighting and cabinetry. Those numbers are guesses until someone tells the builder what is actually going in. When the allowances are priced against a resolved scheme, the tender lands much closer to what you end up paying at handover.

• Kitchen layout and appliance schedule, so plumbing and power rough in is drawn once
• Ceiling heights, bulkheads and where the ducted returns come down
• Lighting and switch positions set room by room against the furniture layout
• Joinery for the whole house, not only the kitchen, so the builder prices real cabinetry
• Floor set downs for tiled wet areas and every stone or timber threshold
• Window and door head heights checked against curtain tracks and pelmets

Working alongside your architect and builder

The lines are clear and we keep them that way. Your architect owns the building and the approvals. Your builder owns the program, the trades and the contract. We own the inside of the envelope: spatial planning, material palettes, joinery documentation and the lighting design.

Our drawings go into the same set your builder is already reading, so nobody works from a mood board and a phone photo. We visit at frame stage and again at lock up, because that is when the questions arrive. If you have not appointed an architect yet, we draft, and we are happy to come in first and hand a resolved brief to whoever you choose.

Resolved in 3D before anyone prices it

Custom home design is easy to agree to on paper and hard to picture. We build the house in 3D and walk clients through it in virtual reality at full scale, which is where people discover the island is 300mm too long or the ensuite door swings the wrong way.

Finding that in a headset costs an afternoon. Finding it at frame stage costs a variation. That single habit has saved our clients more money than any other part of the process.

New builds we have worked on

Luxxe has completed four residences on the Sovereign Islands, among them homes of more than 4,000 square metres internal floor area and valued at more than $20 million. Closer to the studio, there is the Carrara new build. In Sydney we worked on the Lindfield build and the Fairway Drive Residence, both run from the Gold Coast with drawings, renders and site visits, which is how most of our interstate custom home design runs.

The studio also covers kitchen, bathroom and laundry design, home cinema and bar rooms, decoration and furniture selection, drafting, and renovation work when the project is an existing house rather than a new one.

Questions people ask before signing a build contract

When should I bring you in? At preliminary plans, before the drawings are locked and priced. If you are already at contract, come anyway. There is still ground to gain in the selections and joinery.

Do you replace my builder's design team? No. They keep doing the building. We do the interior, and the two sets of drawings sit together.

Can you work with a plan I have already paid for? Yes. Plenty of our custom home design work starts with a set of drawings the client likes and a nagging feeling that something inside them is not right.

Do you work outside Queensland? Yes. The studio is on the Gold Coast and we design Australia wide using renders, virtual reality walkthroughs, full drafting packages and site visits when the program needs one.