Why We Only Design Single-Story Modern Farmhouses

Most design firms sell range. Look at their websites and the message is some version of "any style, any project, anyone" — a Mediterranean villa next to a glass modern box next to a colonial, all presented as proof of versatility. We do the opposite. We design single-story modern farmhouses, for families, and that's the whole list. No two-story plans, no Mediterranean, no commercial work, no exceptions to chase a project. That sounds like a limitation, and I want to spend this article explaining why it's the opposite — why doing one thing repeatedly is exactly what lets us deliver a better house, at a lower fee, than a firm that does everything.

Why doing one thing produces a better house

The case rests on a simple mechanism: a firm that designs the same kind of home over and over has already solved the problems that kind of home presents, while a generalist solves them from scratch every time, less well.

Think about what's actually hard in a single-story farmhouse. Separating the primary suite from the kids' wing so there's real acoustic and visual privacy, on one level, without the house sprawling into a maze. Chaining the mudroom, pantry, and garage so the way you actually come home with arms full of groceries and children works without thinking about it. Getting the rooflines to read as authentic farmhouse rather than a builder's costume, while keeping them sane to frame and cheap to maintain. Bringing real light deep into a single-story footprint that can't borrow height. Each of these is a genuine design problem, and each has good answers and bad ones. We've solved them hundreds of times, so on your project they're not problems anymore — they're starting points. A generalist who designs a farmhouse this quarter and an office park the next is re-deriving those answers each time, on your dime, and arriving at them less reliably because they don't have the repetitions. All that repetition adds up to judgment, and judgment is most of what you're hiring a designer for.

A narrow focus also changes what we pay attention to over time. Because every project is the same kind of home, every lesson compounds instead of scattering. A detail we improve on one farmhouse carries straight to the next one, and the one after that, because they're all the same animal. A generalist's hard-won lesson on an office building may never apply to their next house. So our work gets better in a specific direction, year over year, in exactly the dimension our clients care about. The narrowness turns experience into a straight line of improvement rather than a scatter of unrelated lessons, and you're hiring the accumulated slope of that line.

Why specialization lowers the fee instead of raising it

Here's the part that surprises people, because we tend to assume a specialist charges a premium. We charge less, and the specialization is the reason we can.

We work at a flat fee — $8 per square foot, all in — rather than a percentage of construction cost that climbs as your build gets more expensive. We can do that precisely because we've built the same kind of home so many times that we know what the work takes. There's no learning curve to fund, no padding to cover the unknowns of an unfamiliar type, no open-ended percentage to protect us against our own inexperience with your project. You're paying for solved problems, not for a generalist's education on your house. A generalist architect's percentage fee, by contrast, has to account for the fact that every project is partly new to them, and it grows with your construction cost whether or not the design work actually got harder. We can hold the fee low because we've done this exact thing enough times to know what it costs, not because we cut corners.

What we've stopped having to relearn

It helps to make the repetition concrete, because "we've done it a lot" can sound like a slogan. When a new project starts, there's an enormous amount we simply don't have to figure out anymore, and that's where the value hides. We know how a single-story farmhouse wants to sit on a half-acre-plus lot to catch light and frame the approach. The pinch points in the mudroom-to-kitchen path are settled before they're drawn, because we've watched families live in the ones we got right and the ones we'd change. We know which roof pitches and overhangs read as authentic and which look like a spec builder's approximation, and how to give a primary suite quiet without marooning it from the rest of the house. None of that is on the table as an open question on your project, because it was settled across the hundreds of homes before yours.

A generalist starts most of those questions from somewhere near zero each time, and the cost of that shows up twice: in the fee, because someone has to pay for the figuring-out, and in the result, because first and second attempts at a problem are rarely as good as the hundredth. This is the same reason you'd rather have a surgeon who performs one operation constantly than a generalist who does a little of everything. Focus runs deeper than broad competence, and on a house you'll live in for decades, depth on your exact kind of house is worth more than breadth across kinds you'll never build.

The narrowness is a promise, not just a preference

There's one more thing the single-focus does, and it's about trust rather than craft. When a firm does only one thing, you can actually verify it. Every project in our portfolio is a single-story modern farmhouse, so what you see is what you'll get — there's no guessing whether the farmhouse on the homepage was a one-off and the real business is something else. The consistency is a kind of accountability. A generalist's portfolio, by contrast, can't tell you whether they're good at your specific home or just busy in general, because the range hides the answer. Our range can't hide anything, because there isn't any. You can judge us entirely on the thing you're hiring us to do.

Who this isn't for

Now the part most firms would never put in writing, and the part I think earns the most trust by being said plainly. This firm is not for everyone, and I'd rather tell you that directly than waste your time.

If you want a two-story home, we're not your firm. Same if you want a Mediterranean, a Tudor, a contemporary, a Craftsman. If you want a designer who'll take whatever you bring and execute it, anywhere, in any style, we're not that either. There are good people who do all of those things, and you should hire one of them for those projects. Saying this costs us nothing we wanted and gains us something real: if you're the family who wants exactly a single-story modern farmhouse, you now know you've found the firm that does only that, all day, better than a generalist could. Telling the wrong client we're not for them is how the right client knows they're in the right place. A firm that claims to be perfect for everyone is telling you it's specialized in nothing, and for a forever home, specialized in nothing is not what you want holding the pen.

What the right client actually gets

For the family we are for, the payoff is concrete, and it shows up first in how the process feels. Because we already speak the language of the exact thing you want, you spend the design conversation refining a shared vision rather than teaching a generalist what a modern farmhouse even is. The clients we work with describe this directly: they feel listened to, and they have a higher likelihood of actually achieving the look they want. Those two things are connected. You feel listened to because we recognize what you're describing — we've heard it, drawn it, and built it many times, so your half-formed idea meets a designer who can finish the sentence. And you get the look you want because matching that look is the one thing we do, rather than one of fifty things we dabble in. The specialist is the person who already understands the home you're picturing, which is why the picture in your head has the best chance of becoming the house on your lot.

The objection, answered

The reasonable worry about hiring a specialist is that you'll get a cookie-cutter result — that a firm doing one kind of home will hand you the same house it hands everyone. It's the opposite. We design one style, but every family, lot, and life inside that style is different, so the work is endless variation on a theme we know cold rather than the same plan stamped out repeatedly. Knowing the type deeply is exactly what frees us to tailor it to you, because we're not spending the project learning what a modern farmhouse is — we're spending it learning what your modern farmhouse should be. A generalist drawing your farmhouse for the third time in their career has less room to customize for you, not more, because more of their attention is consumed by getting the basics of the type right. The pianist who has played a piece a thousand times has more freedom to interpret it, not less, than the one sight-reading it.

If a single-story modern farmhouse is what you want, this is the whole argument

Strip it all down and it comes to one claim: a specialist who designs your exact home repeatedly will out-deliver a generalist who designs everything for everyone. Better-solved problems, a lower and more predictable fee, a process where you're understood from the first call, and a higher chance the finished house matches the one you imagined. The narrowness people read as a limitation is the entire source of the advantage. If what you want is a single-story modern farmhouse for your family, on land you own, you don't want the firm that can do anything. You want the one that does this.

If a single-story modern farmhouse isn't what you're after, I hope this at least helps you see what to look for in whatever firm is right for you: depth in your specific kind of home, a portfolio you can actually judge, and a fee structure that reflects how well they know the work. The principle is the same even if we're not the firm — hire the specialist in the thing you actually want.