Even after interviewing eight builders, the one chosen to design and build this contemporary Las Vegas home was replaced by the clients before ground was broken. To the rescue came a designer and builder completing a team whose members, including the clients, worked extremely closely with each other.

The home, completed in June 2009, sits in an exclusive neighborhood due west of the Las Vegas strip’s bright lights, where Tuscan-style homes are banned. By choosing this neighborhood to live in, the homeowners clearly wanted to be different, but that wasn’t good enough. The mission was to stand out within a neighborhood that already stood out from the crowd.

The only way to accomplish this was to truly listen to the clients and invite them to meddle in the process, or at least that’s how Walt Lawler, registered designer and president, Walt Lawler Residential Design in Las Vegas, sees it. “I like my clients to meddle. I like them to tell me what they think. If they don’t do that, it’s not a good project. I need all that client contact; I must interact with them. It makes for a better project. It truly does,” Lawler says.

Check the Ego

Lawler gets it done by not bringing his ego into the equation. “I’m a capitalist first. I want to make money like we all do. So if the client wants the house upside down, I’ll draw it upside down. I do what my clients want and don’t bring my ego into it, which works pretty smoothly. I modify my behavior to fit theirs. I have to be flexible,” he says.

“I also like to keep in contact with my clients. I don’t get a permit and disappear. I’m involved from inception through occupancy,” he adds. In this situation, the interaction worked beautifully because one of the clients has a passion for architecture. “She studies it, she knows it, which makes it easy for her to communicate what she wants because we talk the same language. This is not the first house I’ve had to straighten out, and it has always bothered me that 50 to 75 percent of the time the client is mad at the designer at the end of the day. That’s not what I want to happen,” Lawler explains.

Elise Harron, development manager, Harron Construction Services in Las Vegas, agrees with Lawler that client communication plays an important role in a successful project. She likens it to a short-term marriage. “There was an awful lot of communication. Our goal was to make sure the client’s vision was actually what we constructed, and that required daily communication and hundreds of phone calls,” Harron explains.