Design inspiration can come at any time, especially if you were on the home tour during the 2009 Custom Builder Symposium & Design Institute held in San Diego this past November. The selection of homes featured on the tour once again had builders and designers oohing, ahing and inspecting every little detail.

“The homes were phenomenal,” says Mike Payne Jr., vice president of operations, Payne & Payne Builders in Chardon, Ohio, which also was named Custom Home Builder of the Year during the two-day event. “They’re on the ocean with incredible views. Those builders and architects face site-specific challenges. They had small sites but needed to provide a lot of square footage and drama. So for example, one of them incorporated wells to introduce daylight into the lower levels. And when you walked into one of the homes, you immediately see right through it and look out over the ocean. It’s amazing,” Payne says.

The sunny oceanside environment is different than most parts of the country, but worthy of inspection, says Kathryn Alexander, president/owner, Alexander Design Group in Wayzata, Minn. “A lot of what I saw can be applied here in Minnesota. Our firm deals with upper-end homes and custom waterfront properties, so the oceanfront remodel was comparable to what our clients are looking for in either a teardown and build new or remodel of an existing home. The other homes in the tour all had inspiring ideas,” she says.

“I sometimes find that tours aren’t challenging enough for me, but not the Symposium tours. My personal favorite was the Wardell Builders house in La Jolla where they took the sublevel of the house all the way to the lot lines to pick up extra square footage. We are involved with a lot of variance work because of code restrictions and hardcover requirements. What a creative way to work around setbacks!” she says.

As the sponsor, Lutron Electronics has a hand in choosing the homes on the tour. Effort was made to find homes that fit the interests of both builders and designers, says Erik Anderson, Lutron’s residential solutions manager. “We looked at construction, traffic flow, layout, all things that both architects and builders would be interested in,” he says.