What the guidelines are protecting
A person buying a lot in a custom or semi-custom community is buying two assets. The first is their own home. The second is the reasonable expectation that the homes around theirs will not undermine what they paid.
The second has no other mechanism to protect it. Zoning sets the outer bounds of what is legal, and those bounds are wide. Nothing in a municipal code prevents the home next door from being finished in materials that read as cheap from the street, sited to block the view the buyer paid a premium for, or painted a color that makes the whole block harder to sell.
Design guidelines are the instrument that protects it, and the architectural review committee is what makes them real.
Volunteer committees struggle
Most communities eventually hand architectural review to a committee of residents. It is understandable and it usually goes badly.
The person on the committee is being asked to tell a neighbor that the home they have been planning for a year is not acceptable. They will see that neighbor at the mailbox for the next decade. Under that pressure, decisions bend toward whoever pushes hardest, which produces inconsistency, and inconsistency is fatal. Once one owner gets an exception, the standard is no longer a standard, and the next owner who is refused has a legitimate grievance.
An outside administrator applies the guidelines the same way to everyone, has no relationship at stake, and absorbs the friction that would otherwise land on the neighborhood.
Guidelines that do not fight the sales effort
Here is the tension worth naming: every restriction that protects value also narrows what a buyer can do, and a buyer who feels constrained buys somewhere else.
Badly administered review is one of the more effective ways to slow a community’s absorption. If a buyer cannot find out whether their plan is allowed until after they have paid an architect, or if a submittal takes six weeks to come back, the community develops a reputation among builders and buyers, and that reputation costs sales.
We approach it from the sales side because we run on-site sales and marketing on communities too. That produces a few operating rules.
Write for the buyer, not the lawyer. Guidelines should be legible to someone who is not an architect, so a buyer knows what is possible before they are emotionally committed to something that is not.
Be specific about what is prohibited. Vague standards like “compatible with the character of the community” cannot be applied consistently and give an applicant nothing to design against.
Turn submittals around fast. Most ARC frustration is about delay and ambiguity, not about the standards themselves. Predictable rules enforced quickly are far easier to sell against than loose rules enforced unpredictably.
Say yes in writing early. A preliminary review that tells a buyer their concept is workable before they spend money on construction drawings removes an enormous amount of friction.
Where we have done this
Architectural review has been part of our scope on communities where design consistency was central to the value proposition.
- The Broadlands, Broomfield, golf course neighborhood and Parade of Homes site, 102 homes and lots
- Tallyn’s Reach, Arapahoe County, Parade of Homes site, 68 custom lots
- Springhill Estates, Niwot, 35 custom homes
- Coral Place, Greenwood Village, 30 semi-custom homes
- Battlement Mesa, Garfield County, leases, land, and new homes
On the two Parade of Homes sites in particular, the review function and the marketing function were inseparable. A Parade site is judged publicly, by thousands of visitors in a short window, and design consistency across the participating homes is a large part of what the community is being judged on.
