Lessons From Designing a 10,000 Square Foot Luxury Home From Scratch

I recently finished designing a 10,000-square-foot custom home in Vancouver, and I have to say it was an adventure. Designing a house of this scale gives you opportunities you simply don't have when renovating an existing home, but having more space and a larger budget doesn't automatically result in better design. My client wanted the house to project taste and success, but some of his initial instincts leaned toward making too many statements at once. Part of my job was therefore to keep pulling the design back toward something more restrained: fewer competing materials, carefully chosen focal points, better proportions and an overall sense of effortless, quiet elegance. The experience reinforced something I've learned repeatedly during more than three decades of designing and renovating homes: real luxury isn't about how much you can put into a house. It's about knowing what to put in, what to leave out and how the home will actually support the way you want to live.

When you're building a home from scratch, one of the greatest luxuries you can create isn't another expensive finish but volume. In this house, a double-height space of approximately 20 feet at the entrance and family room immediately changes the experience of arriving home, giving the interior a sense of generosity and architectural drama before you've noticed a single piece of furniture. But ceilings don't need to soar to 20 feet everywhere to make a difference. Many pre-war New York apartments have nine- or 10-foot ceilings, while grand 19th-century Parisian apartments can go considerably higher, and part of their enduring appeal comes from those elegant vertical proportions. Higher ceilings draw the eye upward, allow taller doors and windows, accommodate larger lighting fixtures and artwork, and can make even relatively simple interiors feel more substantial. The lesson isn't that every room should have a cathedral ceiling—sometimes that can make a room feel cold and cavernous—but that ceiling height should be treated as part of the architecture of the room rather than simply the distance between the floor and whatever happens to be above it.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when designing a large luxury home is assuming that square footage will somehow solve their functional problems. It won't. A 10,000-square-foot house can still be frustrating to live in if everyday things don't have logical places to go. What additional space does give you is the opportunity to design storage around your life from the beginning rather than trying to squeeze it in afterward. In this house, we incorporated extensive built-in storage, cabinetry and dedicated spaces for the things the family actually uses, and that can make an enormous difference to how easily a home stays organized. Pantry cabinets can be positioned where groceries are unpacked, media equipment can disappear into cabinetry, seasonal items can have designated storage, and utility closets can be located on multiple floors so nobody has to carry a vacuum cleaner, broom or cleaning supplies halfway across the house. These aren't glamorous details to photograph, but they're often the things that make an expensive home genuinely luxurious to live in. Good design reduces friction, and when the architecture makes everyday routines easier, maintaining order becomes less of a constant battle and more of something the house quietly helps you do.

My client loved glamour and initially wanted a great deal of visual impact, which is understandable when you're building a home of this scale. The challenge was showing him that if every surface is competing for attention, eventually none of them feels particularly special. We spent considerable time editing combinations of accent materials that, when layered together, were creating visual overload, and instead concentrated the drama in carefully selected places. A few important walls became focal points rather than every wall trying to become one, while some of the more theatrical moments came through spectacular lighting fixtures from RH. That restraint allowed the materials, proportions and architecture around them to breathe. It's one of the paradoxes of luxury design: the larger the budget, the greater the temptation to keep adding, yet sophisticated interiors are often distinguished by what the designer had the confidence to leave out. Marble doesn't need another expensive material beside it to prove that it's marble. Beautiful wood doesn't need embellishment everywhere around it. When materials are genuinely good, give them enough space to speak for themselves.

Furniture has to be properly scaled to the architecture around it, whether you're furnishing a 700-square-foot condo or a 10,000-square-foot house. In a smaller home, that often means avoiding oversized pieces that overwhelm the room, but in a large house the opposite problem can occur: furniture that would look perfectly substantial elsewhere can suddenly appear undersized against high ceilings, expansive walls and generous floor space. Scale, however, doesn't mean that the furniture itself needs to become more elaborate. In fact, when the architecture is already making a strong statement through volume, natural light and beautiful materials, I often prefer furnishings that are quieter. For this house, I recommended understated and comfortable transitional pieces from Crate and Barrel—neither overly traditional nor conspicuously modern—in neutral shades of beige that worked comfortably with the brown floors and allowed the architecture to remain the focus. My client initially gravitated toward furnishings that were somewhat flashier and more unusual, but I reminded him that the house itself was already the statement. The furniture didn't need to compete with it; it needed to be comfortable, beautifully proportioned and tasteful. That's an important distinction in any luxury home. A large room still needs enough furniture to feel inviting and human in scale, but filling an impressive space with equally attention-seeking pieces can quickly create visual noise. When the architecture, furniture, lighting and art all understand their roles, the result feels richer precisely because everything isn't trying to impress you at once.

A 10,000-square-foot house produces another challenge that doesn't become obvious until the walls go up: you suddenly have an enormous amount of space to furnish and a great many walls that need something meaningful on them. My client was essentially building an art collection from scratch, and with seven bedrooms and walls capable of accommodating works five by eight feet or even larger, buying a collection simply to fill empty spaces would have been an expensive mistake. Fortunately, after many years in design I've developed relationships with artists whose work I use in projects, which gave us a starting point for identifying pieces and commissions appropriate to the house. But creating a collection isn't just about choosing 30 or 40 things you like individually. Paintings, photography, mixed-media pieces, sculpture and tabletop objects have to coexist without making the house feel like a furniture showroom, and scale matters enormously. One exceptional large work can give an entire room identity in a way that five smaller decorative pieces cannot. If you're fortunate enough to build a custom home, think about art while you're designing the architecture. Wall dimensions, lighting, sightlines and even furniture placement can be planned around pieces you already own or hope to acquire, allowing the collection to become part of the home rather than decoration added after everything else is finished.

If you want the architecture and materials in your home to stand out, hide as much technology as you reasonably can. Yes, I said hide it, not showcase it. Electronics are useful, sometimes indispensable, and increasingly central to the way we live, but they're rarely the most beautiful things in a room and they become outdated remarkably quickly. A television that seems technologically impressive today will eventually look like an old television; beautiful hardwood, stone, art and well-proportioned architecture can remain beautiful for decades. When you're designing from scratch, you have an extraordinary opportunity to integrate televisions, speakers, wiring, routers, controls and other equipment into cabinetry and architectural details rather than allowing the technology to dictate the room. Let your eye go instead to the hardwood floors, beautifully painted walls, carefully chosen stone, exceptional lighting, art, millwork and the craftsmanship of the house itself. After completing this project, I came away even more convinced that the best luxury homes don't spend every minute reminding you how much they cost. They feel calm, generous, functional and deeply considered. There is confidence in that kind of restraint, because genuine luxury doesn't need to shout across the room to get your attention. It can afford to speak quietly.