** Artisan Custom Estates requested that one of our custom home clients document their experiences in a journal to provide a roadmap of the process for future clients to better understand what to expect from the experience.  That project is now complete and their family is now enjoying the home that they designed and constructed with Artisan Custom Estates.  We will now begin publishing the clients’ journal as a blog with some omissions to protect their privacy.  We hope you find these blog entries informative.  Please contact Artisan Custom Estates (info@artisancustomestates.com) if you would like more detail on any particular portion of the journal or the custom home process in general. **

 Week 1 – A New Opportunity

Hello!  Our names are Bill and Louise and we are residents of Atlanta.  We have spent the last several months looking for our ideal home in the North Atlanta suburbs.  Specifically, we scoured Alpharetta and Milton looking for “the one”.  As a result of our diligence, we identified a particularly ideal swath of northwest Fulton County known as Crabapple.  Ours is a common story in that we both grew up in rural settings but our professional lives led us to the city after college.  Now that we have small children, we want them to be able to enjoy a childhood in the wide-open spaces and clean air of north Georgia rather than the congestion and traffic of the metro area.

After looking at a multitude of existing homes (both new specs and resales) in our target area of Milton / Alpharetta, we assembled a great many ideas as to the attributes that we would like (and not like) in our ideal luxury home.  However, we never felt compelled to buy anything that we toured.  There was always something substantive that we would have added or changed about the home, or the home was great but the property was lacking. 

We recently took an inventory of what we had learned after a couple of months.  First, we had firmly decided on a custom home in Alpharetta / Milton area and Crabapple specifically.  Second, we knew what we were looking for in a lot: good size for a yard (1+ acre), privacy, and the ability to add a pool as the kids get older.  Finally, we knew generally what we were looking for in a custom floor plan (openness, long sight lines) as well as the style of the elevation.  It was at this point that we decided to explore the option of building a custom home in Alpharetta into which we could incorporate all of our accumulated ideas.

We then set out to identify the right Alpharetta custom home builder to transform our loosely defined vision into a reality.  A few potential luxury home builders came immediately to mind based on the homes we had already seen.  A few weeks ago, we selected Artisan Custom Estates as our builder.  We fell in love with their style, had great chemistry with the Artisan Custom Estates team, and felt good that they would be the right business partners in what will be a very significant investment.

Artisan Custom Estates has asked that we document a journal of our experience as a roadmap for other folks who are interested in building a custom home that is uniquely theirs.  Artisan estimates that the entire process including land selection, custom architecture development, and the actual construction process will take approximately one year.  So, we will call our journal “52 Weeks of Building a Custom Home in Alpharetta”. 

We are so excited to be getting started! – Bill