Have you ever walked into a newly built home and felt completely underwhelmed? Unfortunately, it’s all too often the case with new builds where fairly low-end fads get installed across a neighborhood for several years leaving new homeowners and guests anything but excited for an expensive home that feels common, boring, and hardly worth it.
Implementing custom home ideas means more than just building new and going along with whatever cookie-cutter concepts are in vogue at the time. Personalizing your home with custom vents, your favorite paint colors, stylish hardware, and investing in custom cabinetry and design elements will take your home from blah to beautiful. But the benefits go far beyond the naked eye—we’re talking greater convenience, elevated comfort and satisfaction, and even increased home value. Read on as we explore five ways to make your home more custom and the many reasons why you’re going to want to take your home to the next level, too.
Focus On Vents
You may be surprised to learn that our first suggestion for how to make your home custom isn’t an in-your-face renovation. Rather, this custom home idea appeals to the idea that the overall look and feel of your home are actually in the details. We’re talking about custom vent covers.
Vents for a custom home can make areas you’d normally want to draw the eye away from new areas of interest and beauty. Custom heating and cooling vents can reflect personal style and even match existing architectural or decorative features in the home. The right custom vent covers can be painted to complement or blend into your color scheme and add just enough personalized je ne sais quoi to satisfy the need to truly feel at home in your space—not to mention the added oomph to set your home apart from anyone else’s.
But heightened aesthetics aren’t the only benefit of this easy custom home idea (and we do mean easy—check out this popular post for how to choose and even install our custom vent covers yourself!) Custom vents can also be a great way to maintain proper balance in your home’s HVAC system, leading to air quality, circulation, and temperature control, as well as a potentially decreased heating and cooling bill.
Adding unique vents for a custom home makes perfect sense, especially in heavily trafficked areas such as the living room and kitchen. But don’t forget to bring that extra personality to places like the laundry room and bedrooms for a totally cohesive style throughout your entire home. Shop our custom vent covers here to pick the perfect design for you!
Paint For Customization, Look, And Feel
It’s likely that the first thing you see when you walk into your “custom” home is white. White walls, white cabinetry, white countertops—so much white, everywhere. And while white paint has its rightful place in any home (it’s both popular and classic for a reason!), experimenting with paint colors to create a truly unique living space is our second custom home idea.
Now, this doesn’t mean throwing any old color on any given surface and calling it good. Choosing the best paint color for your rooms can take plenty of thought and consideration, but it’s well worth the effort when you see your favorite colors come to life in the right space. Paint can completely transform a room into something you never dreamed of. Lighter colors can brighten and enlarge a space, while darker shades can bring attitude and coziness. Combining certain colors—along with well-chosen materials and textures—can invite a sense of calm and relaxation while others can spark energy and excitement.
No matter how you look at it, which feelings get encouraged in your spaces are heavily influenced by your paint color choices. And while choosing the right hues for your household is up to you, we’ve got some of our favorite paint colors, popular color combinations, and paint brand suggestions all put together for you here to simplify the process. Just keep in mind that the possibilities are truly endless here. Playing with color placement, paint finishes, and even combining the right paint color with textural wall treatments or wallpaper are all ways to highly customize your own unique spaces and make your house truly feel like home.
A few things to consider when choosing paint for your custom home are how long you plan to be there, how much effort you’re willing to put into repainting if you get tired of a certain color, and how leaving old-trend paint in your home can affect its resale value. Choosing trendy paint colors—like current softer blues and greens—can be a risk very much worth taking if you plan on enjoying them for years to come or selling soon enough that new buyers will also love the custom paint work you’ve put in. But if you’re more risk-averse and willing to stick with beautiful classics like black, white, and other neutral tones while letting furniture and artwork do the heavy color lifting, that’s a great option, too.
Hardware For Personalization
Our third custom home idea is all about the hardware. Basic builder-grade knobs and pulls may get the functional job done but often they do little to add to the real style and beauty of a home. Switching to custom hardware for the home is yet another simple way to make a massive visual impact in every part of the house.
It’s not that you need to choose overly showy pieces, either. It’s as simple as finding the right style for your personality so every last piece of your aesthetic comes together seamlessly. Hardware is the perfect way to connect the dots between lighting, faucets, furniture, shelving, and even art and decor. And whether you’re looking to add a touch of sophistication and elegance to a feminine bathroom or a bit of quirk to your own master closet, there are literally thousands of beautiful cabinet hardware options to choose from in different styles, materials, and finishes, which means complete and total customization is at your fingertips—literally.
All that being said, there are some basic guidelines you’ll want to follow when installing new hardware for your custom home. Our post containing essentially everything you need to know about cabinet hardware should get you well on your way to everything from proper proportions to coordinating pulls and knobs throughout the room and other spaces in the house. Following these guidelines will likely guarantee you pick the right handles for cabinet drawers and knobs for cabinet doors—but you also shouldn’t be afraid to venture outside the box and make a statement with the custom hardware for your home when it just feels right.
Cabinetry And Design Elements
There aren’t many things better than brand-new cabinetry—that fresh, clean feeling of being the first to put dishes and appliances away in them is like a comforting sigh of relief. But how much better if they’re not just basic, pre-made boxy cabinets from a mass manufacturer? Custom cabinetry and design are our fourth (and possibly our very favorite) custom home idea.
In our opinion, cabinetry all throughout the home should serve your exact needs and desires. That means that—space permitting—a couple big on cooking should have an extended island for plenty of workspace, a pullout specifically designed for pots and pans, and even an extra (and hidden) dishwasher in the kitchen. And that a family who loves movie nights should have the ultimate entertainment center designed just for them, complete with an oversized drawer for cozy blankets, a custom channel for hiding wires and plugins, and vented cabinet doors for the best air circulation around their electronics collection. And don’t forget about the large household full of busy overlapping schedules—it’s likely they’ll need custom cabinetry and design to create the perfect double sink bathroom vanity with plenty of out-of-sight storage for extra towels, makeup, and other supplies.
But custom cabinetry ideas aren’t just about the functionality of extra storage or having upper cabinets at just the right height, either. They add a depth of visual interest that no free-standing furniture can contribute to a space. They help create that ultimate sense of “my home” to a house, felt by anyone passing through. But they also add plenty in terms of increased home value—because even if a future buyer doesn’t have the exact needs you did, the well-designed, professional look and luxury of custom built-in cabinetry is something everyone can appreciate.
Need ideas for how to make the most of the custom cabinetry in your home? Check out the Christopher Scott Cabinetry & Design portfolio or contact us to start making your vision come to life!
Focus On Unique Ideas
Our fifth custom home idea is to simply enjoy some creative freedom and express yourself in ways that fit your lifestyle and personality. Whether that means having a professional paint a mountain mural in your home office so you can dream up your next adventure from home or bringing in custom light fixtures to highlight your family heirlooms, the choice is up to you.
A few more ideas to get your creative juices flowing include:
- Custom-shaped windows with built-in window seats
- Uniquely designed flooring or rugs
- Transforming a seldom-used corner into a small library or reading nook
- An under-stair storage space, bar, or built-in desk
- Upgraded interior door handles
- A well-designed focal wall using unconventional materials
- Switching from a standard shower to a soaking tub with custom shelving nearby
- Creating cozy built-in kennels for your fur family
The key to success in this area of custom home design is to make sure it’s unique to you and that it’s worth the energy and investment for a number of reasons and years to come. Switching frequently between fads can be exhausting and doesn’t help to express your family’s true personality!
Create Your Own Custom Home With Christopher Scott
Far from the sterile boredom you feel walking into a home that’s essentially been mass-produced, walking into a home that’s been customized to reflect real personalities and lifestyles is refreshing, inviting, and impressive. By using any of these custom home ideas, or a combination of several, you can create a home that feels more comfortable, more functional, and more beautiful than you could have imagined.
Do you have your own ideas for how to make the perfect custom home for your family? Reach out to us at Christopher Scott Cabinetry for interior design ideas, paint consultations, and the ultimate in custom cabinetry and design for the modern home.
