Laurence Luxury

One of our recent custom home customers had a great idea. They purchased a time lapse camera and set it to take occasional photos all during the construction of their new home. Afterwards, they pieced them all together in this awesome video. What a great way to chronicle the activity!

If you’re interested, the home owners use this camera to make it all happen.

We’re proud to share this photo of our newest completed custom home (grass courtesy of PhotoShop). The lucky family will be moving in within a week, and we’ll be sure to share some additional photos once our photographer is able to visit!

Our newest custom home in Baltimore

This outstanding home is available for over $14.5 million in the Hamptons.  It has a great pool house too.  The developers bill this house as “less is more” as they could have done a McMansion.  I love modern, and this one is special because it’s done in traditional Hamptons cedar shingles, not split block, which is such a cliché.  Modern architecture is like custom cufflinks – a very personal statement.

Surely, a large percentage of the price for this house is due to its location.  It would be our honor to create so personal a statement for our customers, whether in the modern vernacular or any other style.  Homes like this don’t have to be expensive, they just have to be exquisite.

As you may have surmised from my previous blog entries, we spend a lot of time here at Laurence, talking about luxury – what luxury actually is, how to get it, how to provide it, how to design it.  I think that first and foremost, luxury is about always having everything where it’s supposed to be when you reach for it.

Others think luxury is about appearances and grandness, regardless of ease of use. That may be true at first glance, but when considering the meaning of luxury, I am reminded of my mother’s stories of having to drive friends to the repair shop to pick up their “luxury” cars. She would laugh and laugh because her Chrysler was completely reliable, very comfortable, and consistenly worked when it was necessary to pass by Beverly Hills Rolls Royce.

For a while now, we’ve been working on a design called the Hillhouse.  The exterior and basic floorplan are outstanding examples of American Folk Victorian architecture.  But, I wasn’t perfectly excited with the second floor, and had it reworked by one of our staff architects.  Thinking it was still not perfect, our new young rising star, Daniel Ankri tackled the floor plan and I am just thrilled with the results!

Please view this exciting plan in the Custom Homes section of our website here.

Did you see the “Heard On The Street” in October 10^th’s WSJ?  Gianni Versace has closed the last of its boutiques in Japan.  More significant is the rise of Uniqlo, a highly profit able and fast rising fashion retailer worldwide.  Here’s a link to their SOHO store.

Also check out their site www.uniqlo.com for a more international perspective.  The WSJ suggests that, “The switch from haute couture to high street might give fashionistas a hint about fall trends in Paris.” I don’t know.  Even Betsey Bloomingdale has dropped haute couture and now wears and sells ready made clothes.  Could it be that more and more customers realize, as do I, that consistent quality is more important than provenance or grandeur?

In preparation for our new Custom home program, look for our website changes. I’ve been poring through house plans that would be appropriate for our customers.

We are a choosy lot, we Laurence people, so not just anything will do. Very exciting are some of the small/midsize (depends on your view!) Colonial plans and some of the Contemporaries and Moderns could be restyled to fit into Maryland so nicely. I still veer toward the open space plans, and consistent with my Green bent, toward houses that use less land.

We hope to roll out a new line of homes, exclusively ours, later this year. They will be narrow and deep, designed for narrow lots or to show off side yards. Expansive side yards are perfect for garden paths, cabanas, guest cottages and lap pools. They let a home be viewed from more than one perspective thus lending depth and dimension to the vista. Otherwise, the house could just look like another slab front, mass produced home. An exciting feature on these homes will be courtyards and other 3 season outdoor living spaces. I’ll share more about this exciting new line soon.