New Construction Homes

Wanderluxe Interiors is a Silicon Valley-based interior design studio working on new construction homes across the full spectrum from fully custom architect-led builds, semi-custom new homes, teardown-and-rebuild projects, and spec homes purchased at any stage of construction. The work is led by Jodi Deister, who lives in Los Gatos, and is organized around a single discipline: that interiors are best when they're integrated into the construction at the point where decisions are still inexpensive to make. The earlier the studio is involved, the more cohesive the result.

The new construction spectrum and where the studio fits

"New construction" covers more than fully custom. In Silicon Valley specifically, a client commissioning a new home may be working from any of five starting points: an architect-led fully custom build; a semi-custom build with a builder's framework and decision-point customization; a spec home purchased pre-foundation, mid-frame, or post-occupancy; a production or volume-builder home with curated selections; or a teardown-and-rebuild on an existing lot. This is common in Atherton, Palo Alto, and Los Gatos where the land carries more value than the structure. Each of those situations asks different things of an interior designer.

Wanderluxe is built to work across all five. The discipline travels: read the building's architectural logic, design the interior into the construction rather than onto it, coordinate selections with the builder's schedule and the architect's drawings, and treat the client's privacy as a brief input rather than an inconvenience. For projects that are fully custom and architect-led from programming forward, see also Custom Home Interiors the studio's deep-dive sibling service for that specific mode.

When the designer should be involved

The single most expensive decision a client makes on a new construction project is when to hire the interior designer. The architectural cost curve, documented in Patrick MacLeamy's well-known practice diagram, shows the ability to influence cost and performance is highest in programming and schematic design, and that the cost of changes rises sharply once construction documents are issued. The peer-reviewed construction-economics literature confirms it in dollars: Love and Li's 2000 study in Construction Management and Economics quantified design-change-driven rework on residential projects at roughly 3.15 percent of contract value, with Josephson and Hammarlund putting the broader rework range at 2 to 6 percent.

The practical version: the interior designer should be engaged six to twelve months before ground-break, and ideally during or before schematic design. The ASID Project Phases and Process framework — the canonical reference for residential and commercial interior practice — describes programming as "problem-seeking" rather than design-producing. That is the phase in which built-ins get planned into the architecture, lighting becomes part of the ceiling assembly rather than surface-mounted later, mechanical closets get placed where they don't compromise the floor plan, and seismic detailing for stone and millwork enters the structural drawings. Every one of those decisions is essentially free in programming and expensive once framing is complete.