News reports may be filled with doom and gloom for home builders, but those professionals whose business is focused on the custom second-home market aren’t seeing signs of slowdown. From North Carolina’s mountains to Montana’s Big Sky country, these pros are staying busy creating high-end vacation retreats designed with a family-friendly emphasis, and with budgets that often rival those of their owners’ primary residences.

Bonnie Pickartz observes the vacation-home market from both a local and national perspective. As owner, with her husband David, of Franklin, N.C.-based Goshen Timber Frames, she sees little slowdown in demand for custom getaways in North Carolina’s scenic Blue Ridge Mountains. And, as vice president of the Timber Frame Business Council, a national association of timber-frame builders, she sees equally strong demand in other areas of the country, as well.

“I don’t think people who are building long-term vacation homes took a hit on the subprime mortgage market,” she says.

“We haven’t seen a slowdown in our market, and we’re not seeing it as a whole in the industry.”

That observation is echoed by other second-home specialists, in areas ranging from Texas to Michigan and Montana. In fact, some custom builders are seeing growing activity in this market segment, as value-conscious buyers seek to take advantage of potentially lower prices.

“With a lot of the really custom stuff, people are starting to move now, because they think it’s a good time to buy again,” says Brian Scott, president of Lone Pine Builders, in Big Sky, Mont. “What you have now is all the builders are fighting for those clients because all the other building has slowed down.”

Casual Comforts

When it comes to design, these big-budget clients are similarly single-minded. They may desire formality in their first homes, but informality is the guiding principle when it comes to their vacation home’s appearance. And, where their weekday residences may feature spacious bedrooms and private spaces, when it comes to the weekend, these owners want wide-open interior spaces for gathering their families together.

“I think, instead of a normal house where you have a grown-up living room, vacation homes are much more about family living together,” says David Webber, AIA, principal of Webber Studio in Austin, Texas. “So there are fewer of those living spaces, and they’re all contiguous to each other.”