Designing Demand

Fran Icenhower started designing concrete homes about a decade ago. She has been a residential architect for much longer than that, but she was intrigued by a home she happened upon on the Oregon coast. It was constructed with insulated concrete forms, and it offered some unique benefits, which she noted mentally.

“The house was sandwiched between the Oregon Coast Highway and the ocean. When you went inside and you shut the door, you didn’t hear the highway and you didn’t hear the ocean,” she recalls.

When a client later came to Icenhower with a specific problem, she remembered that house. “Our city had an outdoor amphitheater that brought in jazz and rock bands, and the client owned a home that was about two houses away from this amphitheater,” Icenhower says.

Her clients wanted to rebuild on the same property, and they wanted a home that could

block out much of the noise generated by this amphitheater. So Icenhower recommended ICFs. It became her first ICF project, and today she has about a dozen custom ICF home designs to her credit, including her own home built two years ago.

Icenhower is just one of dozens of architects across the country who are successfully creating or modifying plans to work with concrete building systems. Some are finding market conditions drive them to design for concrete construction, but most are finding that consumers are the real drivers.

Consumer Driven Design

For Jerold Axelrod, president of Perfect Home Plans, Inc., concrete building systems were not on his radar. Running a busy architectural firm in New York that specializes in custom plans as well as pre-drawn residential plans, his focus was traditional building systems. An ICF manufacturer initially approached Axelrod to create plans for ICF homes, but it has been homeowners who have kept this niche going in his company.

More often than not it’s consumers rather than builders who ask for concrete home plans, Axelrod says. “They want to build an ICF house, so they buy a set of plans from us and then find a contractor in their area who can build an ICF home.” Because of the demand his company eventually took some of their most popular house plans and modified them to work with ICFs. So far they have converted about 25 of their best-selling plans, and they’ve sold them to customers from New Hampshire to Arkansas.

It is a similar story for Icenhower. While her first ICF home was her idea, most of her subsequent ICF designs have been a result of educated clients coming to her. “It’s generally a client who comes to me without a contractor who wants an ICF home,” she says. “They are people who have done research online or have been referred to me because they want ICFs.” This is particularly intriguing when you consider where Icenhower designs. She is based in Medford, Oregon, the heart of the nation’s logging industry, where people rarely consider building with anything but wood.

In Florida, on the other hand, people rarely consider building with anything but concrete, points out James Zirkel, president of House Design Services in Altamonte Springs, Florida. Home Design Services is the nation’s largest provider of pre-drawn plans for concrete homes. Local market conditions seem to be the biggest factor in the decision to build with concrete.

“In some places, the hurricane situation has pushed virtually the entire market to concrete block and other forms of concrete construction,” Zirkel insists. In central Florida virtually everything he does is concrete block, and Texas is his second biggest market. “Our hottest markets for our concrete home plans are up and down the East Coast, as well as up through the Gulf States,” he says.

While most of his plans are designed for concrete block, Zirkel also designs for ICFs. PolySteel asked him to create a catalog of ICF home designs for their products, and he often gets requests from consumers to have concrete block plans converted to ICF.

For Theodore Dial, an architect in Mobile, Alabama, and creator of Dac-Art Building System, a custom made dry-stack concrete block, the requests for his products and services almost always come directly from the consumer. “Our direct clientele has not been builders. It’s people who want this look on their home, and then they bring a builder in after they’ve already decided they want Dac-Art,” Dial says.

Dial, who loves old world buildings and has visited Paris dozens of times over the years, made a study of the architecture and materials of centuries-old buildings. His company Dac-Art (short for Dial Architectural Components) recreates that look using modern methods.

Dial creates custom molds for his architectural plans, to cast concrete blocks that look like weathered European stones. When the concrete blocks are dry-stacked in place, they serve as a complete wall system, which can be assembled with or without insulation. His clients are often so delighted with the results they create personal Web sites praising the system and showing the progress of their new homes.

Don’t Wait for the Wave

While consumers may be the impetus behind the wave of architects designing for concrete building systems, you don’t have to wait for consumers or designers to find you. Remember Fran Icenhower? That first ICF home she designed wasn’t an easy sell. After creating plans that used ICFs, she determined the best company willing to install the ICFs was four hours away and demanded an astronomical figure for their services. It priced her design out of the running, and as far as she knew, the deal was dead.

Not long after, Icenhower got a cold call from a local concrete contractor peddling his services—which included an ICF product. She was feeling pretty frustrated with the whole idea of concrete construction, and she told the contractor—in an attempt to get rid of him, she admits—that if he talked to these clients and could resurrect their ICF home, he would have her attention.

The contractor, Darrin Thornton, president, Polysteel Alternative Building Systems, did resurrect the project. His knowledge and expertise, as well as a better price for the ICF construction, won the clients over. In the end, Icenhower and Thornton worked together, not just on that home but on several more, including Icenhower’s own ICF home. She began sending Thornton to close on projects if the client was open to ICFs or the project was an appropriate application. “He would go in and talk to the clients and help them feel comfortable with the product,” she says.

Thornton also brought clients to Icenhower. A concrete contractor by trade, Thornton got into the ICF business more than a decade ago. His initial interest in ICFs was for their ease of use—“Five pounds of block is a whole lot less than 60 pounds of plywood,” Thornton says. His company, also based in Medford, Oregon, became a distributor of ICFs, and as a result, he started pounding the pavement to sell his product as well as his concrete services.

“That turned into walk-ins and face time with designers and architects and engineers who we had dealt with on other projects,” Thornton says. From there, he carefully cultivated relationships, like that with Icenhower, to do business together. Today, his clients come to him through these relationships—either directly or indirectly. They come to him looking for ICFs and he takes them to designers and general contractors he’s worked with, or designers and general contractors bring their clients to him for the ICFs and concrete work.

Thornton recommends his method to anyone building a concrete home building business. “Create alliances with the designers, the architects, the engineers and especially the ready mix supplier,” Thornton advises. When you offer your services and expertise, you expand your potential customer base as well as theirs. The architect will design the home and you can provide the contracting, he says. The complementary services will be a boon for any client looking for a quality home.

From selling the client to selling the general contractor, Thornton became a true partner for architect Icenhower. “He became my concrete dictionary,” says Icenhower. “We problem-solved together.”

Home Design Resources

Find a pre-drawn plan or have a custom plan designed. Check in with the companies mentioned in this article.

• Dac-Art Building System, Theodore Dial, 800-803-2601, www.dac-art.net

• Fran Icenhower Design, Fran Icenhower, 541-779-0727

• House Design Services, James Zirkel, 800-771-5444 www.hdsplans.com

• Perfect Home Plans, Inc., Jerold Axelrod, 800-532-0053 www.thehousedesigners.com

Additional Web Resources

These sites, sponsored by the Portland Cement Association, have pre-drawn house plans, directories of architects, and lots of resources for designing concrete buildings.

• ConcreteThinker.com A site created by Portland Cement Association, ConcreteThinker.com is geared toward helping to education architects in concrete construction. But builders and contractors can get lots of ideas through resource areas and case studies, as well as names of architects who have experience designing for concrete building systems. www.concretethinker.com

• Portland Cement Association Visit their web site and click on “Concrete Homes,” then on “House Plans.” From there you can search a database of pre-drawn house plans or you can browse a listing of custom home designers, state by state, who design for concrete building systems. www.cement.org