The Conversation Before the Contract: What to Ask a Custom Home Builder, and What the Answers Tell You
Most people preparing to hire a custom home builder spend a significant amount of time looking at the work. Portfolios. Completed projects. Referrals from friends who have built before.
That research is useful. It tells you what a builder has done. It does not tell you what building with them will actually be like.
The gap between those two things is where most custom home projects run into trouble. Not because the builder lacked skill, but because the client did not discover until construction was underway that the process was not what they had imagined.
The way to close that gap is a direct conversation before you sign anything. Not a sales conversation. A due diligence conversation, one where you are listening not just to what the builder says, but how they say it, and what they cannot quite answer.
This article gives you the specific questions that surface what you actually need to know, and what to make of the answers you get.
Building Your Maine Home From Away: What Remote Clients Need to Know Before Breaking Ground
There is a moment that almost every out-of-state client describes the same way. You have found the land. The plans are close to where you want them. You have had a few good conversations with a builder and the project feels real. And then you get in the car, or board the plane, and drive back to Boston or New York or wherever home is right now, and somewhere on the highway it hits you.
You are about to spend a significant amount of money on something you cannot watch every day. That feeling is normal. It does not mean you are making a mistake. It means you are paying attention. The question is not whether to build from a distance. Thousands of people do it every year, and many of their homes are exceptional. The question is what separates the clients who look back on the experience with confidence from the ones who spent eighteen months white-knuckling it from four hours away.
The answer, almost without exception, comes down to the builder they chose and the process that builder runs.
We Signed the Contract. Why Hasn't Construction Started?
It is a fair question. You signed the building agreement. The design feels complete. The property is ready. From the outside, it can seem like construction should begin immediately.
Instead, there is a period of measured planning. That period is called pre-construction. Pre-construction is where design intent becomes build-ready instruction. It is where pricing is validated, sequencing is confirmed, and long-lead materials are positioned before labor is deployed. On a custom home at this level, that work is not administrative. It is foundational.
How to Choose the Right Builder for Your Custom Home
Most people building a custom home at this level have done their research. They've visited websites. Reviewed portfolios. Talked to people who've built before. By the time they're sitting across from a builder, they've already developed a shortlist and a general sense of who seems capable. The problem is that capability is easy to project and hard to evaluate from the outside. Portfolios are polished. Websites are refined. References are positive. At a glance, most builders at this price point appear qualified. The meaningful differences almost never appear on the surface. They live in the structure of how a builder actually runs a project, manages a client, and holds things together when complexity arrives, as it always does.
What It Means to Build a Home That's Actually Yours
Most people who decide to build a custom home have lived in enough houses to know exactly what they don't want.
They don't want the floor plan that works for everyone and therefore feels right for no one. They don't want the finishes selected from a builder's catalog, the ceilings that feel half a foot too low, the kitchen that faces the wrong direction and misses the morning light entirely. They have spent years in spaces that were fine, and fine has run its course.
Maximalist Approach
Decor Maine, Issue No. 06
A home on the southern coast pushes the limits of scale.
There’s a line somewhere about “best-laid plans” that is apt for this Kennebunkport titan. What started as an 8000 squarefoot design grew to over 14,000 squarefoot by the time construction wrapped. “A lot was added along the way,” says builder Kevin Lord. These additions included a golf simulator, a wine cellar, theater, and butler’s quarters—to name a few. “These ended up fifilling the basement, which meant we needed room for the mechanicals, the components that actually run the home,” Kevin says. “We ended up adding a lot of structure to the living space below ground, under the patios, under the stairs. We couldn’t make the home any larger, but anywhere there was existing coverage, we were allowed to build below. A lot of the home we extended sub-grade.”
That’s Entertainment
Maine Home+Design, July 2021
A retreat for a New York couple in Kennebunkport is all about flow and relaxing with family and friends.
When asked what drew them to the Pine Tree State, Ken and Amy Ross credit their son as the primary influence. “Clint turned our New Yorker family into lovers of Maine,” says Ken, a longtime CBS executive and television producer whose credits include Space Jam. Amy, who spent years in public relations for the entertainment industry but is now a professional chef, explains that their son, now 27 and about to be married, spent time at Chewonki, the camp and environmental education organization based in Wiscasset, and later attended Colby College in Waterville. “We always told him we’d follow him wherever he went,” she says.
Working Vacation
Decor Maine, December 2020
The owners of this Kennebunk Beach house had vacation in mind when they commissioned their summer home, but that didn’t mean they wanted (or could) unplug entirely. “One owner needed a space where he could work while they were enjoying summers in Maine,” says builder Kevin Lord. “The ofice became a very important part of the project.”
Location, Location, Location
Decor Maine, September 2020
A couple transform an 1800s captain’s house, smack-dab in the center of Cape Porpoise village.
When one’s home base is a 100-acre farm north of Toronto—a place where, until recently, couples got married in the rolling fields and toasted their new life in the renovated barn—the Maine harbor town of Cape Porpoise, nine hours south, almost feels bustling in comparison.
Building a Sense of History
Maine Home+Design, August 2018
Salvaged materials and careful choices fill a new home with warmth and permanence.
There aren’t many locations in Maine—or anywhere— that can rival a particular narrow spit on the southern coast, bounded on either side by dark ledges of water-worn rocks and bright tangles of beach roses. The wide-open sea stretches away on one side, while the other looks back over a small cove and sandy beach. Near the end of this spit is a small parcel of land that for many years held an old cottage and garage. When the homeowners decided to rebuild, they were committed to honoring the special character of the spot with a home that welcomes guests and family with a sense of place and history.
Hard Work Ethic
Maine Home+Design, April 2018
For custom homebuilder Kevin Lord, success happens the old-fashioned way.
In direct contrast to the stunning, richly detailed homes he builds along the southern Maine coastline, Kevin Lord’s office building on Route 1 in Arundel is an unassuming box. On the approach, the only key to its identity is a parked truck lettered with his company’s name, Thomas and Lord. Inside, among the cabinet door and moulding samples, a framed quote attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt offers a key to Lord himself: “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” Lord is more of a powerboat guy, but the words still aptly describe his path to success: he has ridden out the rough waves with hard work, tenacity, and a fearless ability to take risks.
Old World in the New
Maine Home+Design, August 2017
A Kennebunk shingle style for twenty-first-century grandparents.
John and Mary Mills seem as much comedy team as retirees as they talk about their new home in Kennebunk. The story starts with a run. “In the summertime, I am a jogger, not a runner,” John says. “I slog along.” On one such jaunt, on a lovely late August day three years ago, John decided to go farther than usual and run down Parsons Beach Road. If the lane had “No Trespassing” signs, he missed them. He ran past a horse farm and on to an “unbelievably beautiful” stretch of oceanfront with wide views up and down the coast. Oddly, when he returned from what had become an eight-mile run, he found a postcard in his mailbox advertising the very acreage that had so wowed him.
Back in the Neighborhood…For Now
Maine Home+Design, May 2017
Nantucket quaintness meets contemporary chic in Cape Porpoise.
Miami-based Tim Harrington is an active developer responsible for multiple luxury hotels, restaurants, a gym/health center, and other properties, new and developing, in the Kennebunks and Biddeford. He’s been busy on the home front, too, having renovated eight houses in the 29 years that he’s lived off and on in the Kennebunks. In 2013, when I visited the 1880s post-and-beam he’d renovated on the mouth of the Kennebunk River, he told me he was done, at least when it came to his own abodes. The post-and-beam was the house that he loved, the house he was going to stay in.
Warm Welcome
Maine Home+Design, May 2016
Formal meets functional in a Kennebunkport home designed for graciously entertaining family and friends.
Rust Hills, the late fiction editor of Esquire, used to say that the first line of a short story should introduce the themes of the work to come. The same might be said of a home’s front door: it should invite you in, while establishing the nature of what is inside. Perhaps this is more ideal than realistic, but it is an ideal achieved in a couple’s 2013 Kennebunkport home.
Moody Hues
Maine Home+Design, October 2015
A couple balances their sunny Miami Beach life with a swanky, stylish colonial in Cape Porpoise.
One day, a developer friend called Steve Oraham and Jim Samson at their Miami Beach home to say he’d found a “great house in Cape Porpoise and you’re really dumb if you don’t buy it”—a bit of exhortation that was a joke (in its putdown) but earnest enough. “He was probably sick of us staying in his house,” Samson opines. More joking. But the truth was he and Oraham had been coming to the Kennebunks for 20 years, so owning there made a certain sense.
Family Heirloom in Kennebunk
Maine Home+Design, May 2014
A new home anchors Kennebunk’s Gooch’s Beach while referencing the past and anticipating the future.
Since 1660, there has been an inn on one end of Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk. Since 1756, that establishment has been the Seaside Inn, run by the Gooch family and their descendants. In fact, the current owners are ninth-generation innkeepers, which makes the Seaside Inn the oldest continuously operating family business in the country. In 1959, a ranch house called The Dunes was built next to the inn and by 2001—when a Wisconsin bond manager, his wife, and two children were visiting the Kennebunks—the house was available for rental. The family rented each August till 2009, when the Seaside Inn’s 20 acres were subdivided, and the house came up for sale. “We love that beach. We love that community,” the husband says. “We had to buy it or say goodbye.”
Cosmopolitan Cottage
Maine Home+Design, February 2014
A private home for a hotel person.
Real estate developer and hotelier Tim Harrington is responsible, with his business partners, for nine upscale hotels and inns in the Kennebunk area. Their properties include luxury bungalows in the woods; bright, chic rooms at Goose Rocks Beach; a New England inn; and elegant, European-style accommodations: Hidden Pond, the Tides Beach Club, the Kennebunkport Inn, and the Grand Hotel respectively. So where does the Miami-based Harrington rest his weary head when he is in town? The answer has changed in the 29 years that Harrington has been coming to the Kennebunks.
Streamlined Spaces
Maine Home+Design, August 2013
A 1950s ranch renovated for art and stress-free living.
What movies do actors watch, what books do writers read, what clothes do fashion designers wear? I always want the inside scoop. So when I was offered a chance to visit Kevin Thomas’s house, I jumped at it. Thomas is the publisher of Maine Home+Design (as well as Maine magazine), and from 2003 to 2010 he built high-end custom houses under the auspices of what is now Thomas and Lord in Kennebunkport. Since Thomas has built many beautiful houses and seen even more, I wondered what he might want for his own home, given his clear sense of the possibilities.
Boom Town
Maine Home+Design, May 2012
Something is happening in the Kennebunks. People are moving here. Building here. Opening businesses here. Tim Harrington is not surprised. These small towns have always had big heart.
At some point during the planning of my wedding, about the time when dresses and hairstyles and such were being discussed, I balked. All this to-do. It wasn’t my thing. I said to my mother, “I don’t really want to be the focus of attention.”
“But you’re the bride,” she observed.
Well, true enough.
In-Town Bound
Maine Home+Design, May 2012
Two city dwellers build their dream home in Lower Village.
City dwellers are an adaptable bunch. Fueled by the hustle and bustle, they aren’t deterred by a little background noise, and somewhere along the way have made peace with the fact that their personal space is, well, shared. And while most of Maine offers quite a different experience, there are places here where city lovers feel more at home.