Craftsman Style Home Building Boom in Vienna

With its small-town feel surrounded by big-town amenities, proximity to good jobs and transportation, it’s no wonder Vienna is a sought-after place to live with a building boom on its hands.

Construction of new homes in Vienna is on the move with nearly 50 real estate listings on Zillow showing newly constructed homes in a price range of just over $1 million to $2 million. Most of the homes range in size from at least 3,000-plus square feet on up to 9,800 square feet.

Since June, about 30 brand-new homes have been sold, most of them in the price range of $1.5 million.

Many of the homes are Craftsman styles with natural colors, front porches, pendant lighting, hardwood floors, stone fireplaces and plenty of marble and granite in kitchens and bathrooms.

Just this week, The Wall Street Journal noted in an article headlined “Home Buyers Embrace the ’Contemporary Craftsman’ Look,” that what’s popular now is a Craftsman exterior with more open and modern interiors.

Craftsman is a term given to homes largely built between 1905 and the early 1920s, Ted Bosley, director of the Gamble House, a National Historic Landmark in Pasadena, Calif., recently told The Wall Street Journal in its article. The Gamble House is considered a prime example of craftsman architecture

It’s a design style that’s so popular it has at least two magazines devoted to the subject, Arts & Crafts Homes and American Bungalow Magazine. Each year, the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C. holds an Arts & Crafts Conference.

Houseplans.com, a large online seller of blueprints, said 25 percent of the plans it sold in the last quarter were craftsman, compared with 19 percent in the same period a year prior, the Journal article noted.

Often times the new homes in Vienna are being built on land once occupied by smaller ranch-style homes built in the ‘60s and ‘70s that are being purchased and then torn down. The builders creating the new homes are in the market for land, whether it’s a lot or a property that’s past it’s prime and sitting in a primo spot.

Some of the construction companies creating the new homes in Vienna are:

• Ayrhill Homes
• BFR Construction
• Brush Arbor Homes
• Bungalow Homes
• Cloud IX Homes
• Dunhill Builders
• Evergreene Homes
• Govan Builders
• JDA Custom Homes
• Jefferson Homes
• Presidential Construction Group
• Riverstone
• Saxena Custom Homes
• Sekas Homes
• Tricrest Homes
• Wetherburne

Many of the real estate listings show that the homes that the new construction replaced were sold in 2012 or 2013 for about half the price or less of the new home.

PHOTO: 405 Nutley St., SW in Vienna is for sale for $1,349,000. See more about the home on Zillow.com.