"Refacing results in a much more high-end, custom finish than most customers expect," said Gibson, "especially if you add crown or under-cabinet molding, and toe-kick trim".
He apprenticed with a carpenter, then he and a partner began buying property and building high-end custom homes.
Pandora's husband, Fletcher, meanwhile is a maker of "high-end custom furniture" that no one wants to buy.
"The collections are all above mass retail but below the high-end custom level," Mr. Filicia said.
"At least 80percentt of the houses we've done have home gyms," said Charles Cunniffe, an architect in Aspen, Colo., who specializes in high-end custom homes.
"People now want to live in and around their pools," said Dick Covert, executive director of the Master Pools Guild, a network of high-end custom pool builders.
WITH Mark Jansen, a friend who still lives in Ohio, I formed a high-end custom landscaping business in Chagrin Falls, an affluent suburb of Cleveland, in 1970.
Geothermal home heating is cheap ($3,000 a home), but rarely, if ever, installed for neighborhoods and is generally available only in high-end, custom houses.
Finding a contractor with appropriate expertise is a universal problem for home projects of all sizes, although Mr. Ghandour admits that he may have erred when he decided to use a commercial builder without experience in high-end custom homebuilding.
Without knowing it, I had entered the world of high-end custom building and within two years, I was supervising the construction of a 29,000 square-foot mansion on a 180-acre estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut.
IT was an unusual commission, unlike anything that Stuart Silk, a Seattle architect, had been offered in his quarter-century of practice: design three high-end custom homes for clients he would never meet.
