Building a Dream Home: Architectural Designs Automates Their Way to a Humane Workplace

Building a Dream Home: Architectural Designs Automates Their Way to a Humane Workplace

HFC celebrates longtime partner Architectural Designs: their continued success, their innovative spirit, and the office culture they want to come home to.

What became a nice-to-have, a magazine, became an unknown cost center with unknown revenue attached to it. We walked in and said ‘Hey, I guess the last issue we published was the one we just put to bed,’ put all our eggs in the ecommerce bucket, and held our breaths.”

Jon Davis is no stranger to evolving his business from the ground up.

Since taking the helm of his family’s multi-generational custom home plans company, the energetic owner and CEO has nimbly steered it from a glossy paper magazine trumpeting “America’s Best-Selling Custom Home Plans” to the digital era.

“We built a website when the internet started, and I remember having a conversation: ‘Geez, should we sell things on our website? I think we should.’ It’s crazy how far you come from a business that predates the internet.”

And Connecticut-based Architectural Designs has come far: all the way to the top of their industry, with eight straight Best of Houzz nods, wildly popular Pinterest and Instagram accounts that boast followings major magazines would envy, and an annual revenue that just keeps growing — despite a team of only twelve.

It’s a success story that’s almost alchemical: the right experience, right time, right place, and the right people. But behind it, there’s a glimmer of a brighter — and notably kinder — future for a retail and marketing economy shaken by COVID-19 and the automation revolution: how a small team has used strategic tech partnerships and bespoke tools that bend around them to take on major competitors and succeed — without sacrificing the fierce, warm working culture they value.

This is the story of Architectural Designs’s dream home.

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There is nothing usual about the business of selling dream homes online.

It’s what retail professionals would call an emotional, granular product: one that must be designed not only to fit a hundred climates and a thousand communities but also a whole nation’s fiercest and most personal aspirations, from multi-generational mansions built around kitchens shaped for extended families to jewel box home office studios and newly trendy barndominiums — an airy, affordable option based off rural barn conversions. For many of us, a home is the single biggest purchase we can make — and one of the most intimate. “You might only buy one house,” Davis says, “but you might dream of that house for years.”

To understand the complexity of the sale, take that idiosyncratic, highly personal product — and then multiply by the way people buy it. Months often pass between a customer’s first attempts at browsing and the final sale as buyers build and scrap their imaginary futures, making it hard to decipher which lead, illustration, or promo got them to take the plunge. It’s no surprise that the gaps between major industry players can be thin as they compete for what’s usually a one-time sale.

On paper, it’s a recipe for leaning on either staff-intensive personal service — or luck. But there is also nothing usual about how Architectural Designs has built — or rebuilt — their industry-leading house plans firm. As Davis puts it: “We have very clear — very clear — ideas of how things should work.”

“Not even how they should work,” amends COO Kitty Connor, “how we want them to be.”

Davis and Connor are speaking with me, side by side, from their new, light-filled Connecticut office, having taken a first-time plunge on a major multi-year lease. Connor is enthused, assured, and briskly competent; Davis an irrepressible combination of direct, wry, and deeply self-aware about the challenges and satisfactions of running a mature business.

Connor was the first full-time employee at the new, digital iteration of Architectural Designs, joining in 2012. Their easy teamwork is obvious: they finish each other’s sentences, both showing the keen awareness of process that’s marked Architectural Designs’s dedication to transformation. “What creates the structure, the systems we have in place, is procedural,” Connor explains. “There are clear systems in place in order to push the business forward.”

Davis and Connor’s cool-headed emphasis on process is the survival reflex of a business hit by crisis. It’s already seen them through one jarring technological transition: from print and the US Postal Service to digital. “The last magazine was probably when the financial markets crashed in 2008,” Davis recalls, with the shrug of a WWII French resistance fighter: c’est la guerre. “You walk in one day and the sky is falling — there’s a mortgage crisis — and what became a nice-to-have, a magazine, became an unknown cost center with unknown revenue attached to it. We walked in and said ‘Hey, I guess the last issue we published was the one we just put to bed,’ put all our eggs in the ecommerce bucket, and held our breaths.”

After spending six figures on a website rebuild that never made it to launch, Davis was referred to HFC by some mutual acquaintances. “I walked in with my business on an iPad, saying: ‘Hey, here’s my website, you’ve got to take this thing to this level and make up for lost time.’”

“It wasn’t long after that there was a pivot in my mindset that building a new website wasn’t about a flat fee, building it, and parting as friends, but that building it was just the first inning.” The survival reflex had carried his business to dry land, and noticed — hey, there was a beautiful horizon out there. “Build me a platform,” Davis found himself saying, “and then let’s grow it.”

The short-term, rush salvage project turned into a longer-term commitment: six years of thoughtful infrastructure creation to translate what worked in AD’s first iteration, repair what didn’t — and then start tackling the art of the possible.

“We basically are their development house,” says longtime HFC project manager Eric Scott. The project has become a fully flowering business symbiosis: when he talks about the Architectural Designs project, more often than not, Scott says we, and Davis and Connor consider the HFC team part of their own. “There are a lot of really great off-the-shelf software tools for e-commerce, but they require you to oftentimes bend your business around the tool. At some point, certain kinds of businesses with certain needs will outgrow a Shopify site or be limited by it, and won’t be able to grow as they should. With custom software, all those problems go away because we can build the bespoke solution directly to how they want to run their business and the unique parts of their business.”

Connor, Davis, and Scott actively work together to link Architectural Designs’s carefully constructed business systems to an increasing arsenal of software tools. Early targets — automating an onerous, predictable, but vital five-step process to price customer changes to house plans — were all about reducing friction (“We use that word a lot: in the sales process, in the admin process,” Davis reflects). It used to take a full-time staff member; now it autocompletes at the touch of a button.

In most popular fears around software automation, that’s the end of the story: reduce the human factor, and grow the bottom line off of people’s backs. Instead, Davis and Connor are driving a different and arguably deeper-rooted vision for automation: “We’re using software to make our jobs easier so we can do more with the time we have.” Architectural Designs has shifted into designing for their future.

That’s meant branching out into new arenas in a way that supports the business, but also supports existing staff. Content Director David Woolery, who started with little marketing training but a flair for graphic design, has leveraged a posting and analytics toolset designed specifically for him to supercharge Architectural Designs’ social marketing strategy. With it, he’s built the company Instagram into a core component of the business, with almost 500,000 enthusiastic followers. Half the company’s traffic draws from his meticulously curated Architectural Designs Pinterest. With support from HFC marketing strategist Susan Poulton, who joined the project team in late 2019 to unify Architectural Designs’s adventurous marketing efforts and identify places to expand, they’ve produced a robust newsletter strategy that grew AD’s subscriber list from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands in only 18 months. It’s a genuine affinity for the ins and outs of social media he’s been set loose to develop — and in no small part due to his company’s active commitment to clearing less forward-looking tasks out of his way.

“All those seconds, all those minutes doing things where you can do something else matter,” says Connor. “It’s really been transformative.”

That transformation has shown itself in the bottom line: a tenfold increase in revenue over five years as the business they can handle increases — but even more so in how their informal, warm office hasn’t been sacrificed in the process. The things Davis disliked in other jobs — shortened lunchtimes, unnecessary dress codes, and strict ideas about who can get a job done — haven’t reappeared in the name of growth. The robots are doing their work, and the humans of Architectural Designs get to lead their industry — and still clock out promptly at five.

The effects of that change haven’t stopped at the office walls. They’ve rippled into Architectural Designs’s broader industry, through an increasing cadre of builder customers who are using its voluminous plan library to construct their own proactive futures.

“It has changed us, knowing more what people are looking for,” says Raymond Harrington, the operations manager for Brookstone Construction Group. He’s the second generation of his family’s Monroe, GA house-building business, specializing in farmhouses and smaller developments. They’ve been ordering Architectural Designs plans for five years: drawn in by Pinterest marketing, Harrington stuck with AD because the comprehensive website and friendly phone support made custom builds easier. But it’s now actively part of his business planning.

“When you have a website as large as theirs and you can see the content that people are putting out there, you can see trends all across the country on what people are looking for,” he adds. “That just makes it easier on me, because we always have to be changing in this business.”

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As summer wanes into fall, Architectural Designs has settled into the house literally built to their specifications. By July, their core staff was trickling back into their new, larger office, a workplace refrigerator had (finally) been sourced, and the band was back together after a year of distanced working that tested every single system they and HappyFunCorp built. But this time, the shape of the crisis wasn’t an industry falling apart — it was one unexpectedly soaring.

Custom home design was one of the few sectors that flourished even as Americans locked down last March. As almost every state designated builders essential, millions were left to reckon with their fundamental life goals — while noticing all the shortcomings of homes they’d never really got to know.

Sales soared.

“We did not foresee the explosion in the housing market,” Connor says. “The building market — “

“ — blew up,” Davis concludes, his hands open. Boom.

Traffic — and business — grew so much during 2020 that they hired two new full-time staff mid-pandemic, and have shifted into planning into half-decades. They’re partially in step with their industry: during COVID-19, their solo practitioner designers were so busy it was challenging to get them new plans and material, and builders’ schedules are booked out now for several years.

But there is no denying that Architectural Designs has stayed at the front of the pack through the COVID homebuilding explosion because they were ready. There is an overwhelming sense that all the ways they tuned their c. 2008 survival instincts to catch the future came full circle during their pandemic-year surge: their process thinking, their genius for collaboration, their fierce insistence on quality of life, their exquisite understanding of who they are as a team — both strengths and weaknesses, how they need to be pushed forward and when they need holding back — and most of all, their curiosity. (“One of the things I love about AD,” Poulton remarked, “is they are not afraid to try anything.”) The Architectural Designs team has very clear ideas of how things should work, how they want things to be. When pandemic chaos hit, they had already built the engine that let them ride it instead of drowning — because it was designed to give them room to be themselves.

There’s no shortage of professional survivor’s guilt (“entire segments [of the economy] just evaporated like a ray gun hit them, and what happened to us?” Davis muses) but they’re grateful for their luck — and the infrastructure they built to harness it. “I consider us really fortunate that we’ve met each moment with the right response. You can go about life in any number of ways, but if you don’t go through it with your eyes wide open and your thinking cap strapped on tight, maybe we’re not having this conversation today.”

It’s a philosophy that fits equally well in a mindfulness manual or an MBA program. The world is always going to rock under our feet. But even in crisis, it’s worth asking the question of where that new, rearranged landscape lets us travel. If you know who you are and who you want to bring along, you might see wonders.

Architectural Designs is already elbows deep in their next moves: opening up entirely new lines of business alongside Poulton, with Scott’s team ready and eager to make the necessary tools real. “We’re never going to be done,” Connor says with obvious relish, “and that’s the best thing possible. I think that’s what inspires us and makes us so fiercely competitive.

But for now, they’re just happy to be back with each other again in the company they’ve custom-designed to make coming to work enjoyable.

“With the pandemic, it’s like you forget what you missed,” Connor says. “After a while you kind of forgot, and then getting back together was so sweet. Gosh, I just wanted to talk to them across the room. But we showed our resilience, fortitude, scrappiness. I could not have been prouder. We could all work from home; we can do it.” She pauses. “But I think we work better together.”

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Before we sign off, Davis and Connor — always astute — ask me about this article. Why has HFC commissioned it? Well, I say, there are business reasons: to really celebrate what a long-term client’s accomplished, and show why this partnership works so well. But everyone I’ve spoken with about working with you thinks what’s been accomplished here is replicable. Other people, in other industries, could do it too. There are things we can do in relationships — make it through a hard year, think bigger, build a business, create a dream home, catch each other when crisis knocks on the door — that we can’t do as well apart.

The effect surprises me. They’ve been talking, Connor says, about legacy; what Davis wants to be known for. She gestures for him to say. Davis, surprisingly shyly, writes a few words down on a note and passes it to Connor. And she translates: “Making people want to kick ass.”