Customize Your Home. What Makes a True Custom Home?

Most builders that claim to be custom only offer 5 – 8 floor plans to choose from.  From there you can make small changes and additions, but overall, you are very limited with the style or layout options that you are able to work with.   Barrington does not classify that as a true custom home. Yes, you get your choice, but you don’t get as much input as you would think. 

To have a truly customized experience, you should design your dream home from the inside out. Barrington has a portfolio filled with over a thousand plans to choose from and they custom design 20 – 30 new plans each year for new customers. This allows the customer to fulfill their Pinterest dreams and make them a reality.

Barrington Homes can build a variety of styles: modern, prairie, craftsman, Tudor, modern farmhouse, contemporary, cape cod, traditional, Victorian.   The challenge to design new, unique homes in Pittsburgh is so exciting that they jump at the chance to do so for clients.  They don’t stop with the exterior either.  Barrington Homes has done many unique interior features in homes for customers, such as: interior slide from the first floor to the basement, indoor pools, bar rooms halfway between the first floor and the basement, and interior climbing walls, just to nae a few.  Whatever you can dream, we can make a reality.

A great example is a recent completion in The Ridge at Manor. This home was started in the summer of 2018 and finished Thanksgiving of 2019, ensuring this home was not only great quality but everything the homeowners dreamed of. It has a cape cod/nantucket exterior with features that the home owners were looking for to include in its build. They specifically were looking for unique oval windows, a gambrel roof, a cupola, tall columns and pillars and white trim. 

A gambrel roof is a symmetrical two-sided roof with two slopes on each side. The upper slope is positioned at a shallow angle, while the lower slope is steep. This style is simply about adding more detail to the home. This helps add or differentiate the style giving it a more barn-like shape.

The cupola is a relatively small, most often dome-like, tall structure on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome. This is also a form of design style or preference. Many of these features do not have any extra benefits in the structure or functionality of the house, but they cater to the taste of the homeowner. Whether that is a simple exterior style or an addition that allows you to add more light to the inside of your home.

Barrington was presented with various homes that the homeowners liked and each had features or aspects that they wanted in their home. These two features, the gambrel roof and cupola were added to the house because those are common features of a cape cod or nantucket style home. Adding these kept the authenticity of the design.