Custom home design that starts at plan stage, not at the colour appointment

The interior lives in the plan, not on top of it

New home design is mostly sold as a catalogue. Pick a facade, swap a bedroom for a study, sign. The Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 27,658 new private sector houses commenced in the March 2026 quarter and 26,201 completed. Most of those owners will meet an interior designer after the roof is on, if they meet one at all.

Where the fridge sits relative to the island. Whether the bed wall is long enough for a bedhead and two side tables. Each is a dimension, and dimensions belong on the preliminary drawings. Tammy marks up those drawings before they go to working drawings, while a change still costs a redraw and nothing more.

Plenty of clients arrive having already tried a free online planner. Those tools are fine for testing a rough shape, but they will not give a builder the set out or the real dimensions a quote needs. Use one to work out what you want. Do not send one to a builder.

What a change costs depends on when you ask for it

Move a window at preliminary plans and you pay for a redraw. Move the same window after you sign the build contract and you pay a variation. Move it after frame stage and you pay the variation plus the rework, and you wear the delay.

There is a second cost most people miss. Builders carry prime cost and provisional sum allowances for tiling, tapware, lighting and cabinetry. Those numbers are guesses until someone tells the builder what is actually going in. Priced against a resolved scheme, the tender lands much closer to the figure you pay at handover.

• Kitchen layout and appliance schedule, so plumbing and power rough in is drawn once
• Ceiling heights, bulkheads and where the ducted returns come down
• Lighting and switch positions set room by room against the furniture layout
• Joinery for the whole house, so the builder prices real cabinetry
• Floor set downs for tiled wet areas and every stone or timber threshold
• Window and door head heights checked against curtain tracks and pelmets
• Floor plans tested at true dimensions against the furniture you already own

Where the money actually goes

The questions people type into Google before they ring anyone are all about money. Is $400,000 enough. Can you build for $600,000. Is it cheaper to build or buy. Custom home design cost sits behind nearly every one of those searches, and we will not put a figure for your house on a web page. The honest answer turns on your land, your site costs and the level of finish.

What we can tell you is how the money behaves. Structure and site works get locked in early and cost a lot to change later. Finishes do the opposite: they sit in the contract as soft allowances, and that is where budgets slip. The most expensive part of building a house is rarely one item. It is a run of small upgrades approved one at a time, with nobody adding them up.

So we price the interior as a whole scheme, early, while every decision is still cheap. Some clients put the money into the kitchen and keep the bathrooms plain. Either way it is a choice you made, not a number you discovered at handover.

Working alongside your architect and builder

Your architect owns the building and the approvals. Your builder owns the program, the trades and the contract. We own the inside of the envelope. Custom home interior design is the whole of our scope: spatial planning, material palettes, joinery documentation and lighting design.

People often ask whether a building designer is cheaper than an architect. Usually yes, and on a straightforward block one is enough. The fee gap matters less than you would think, because neither documents your joinery or your lighting. That work still has to happen.

Our drawings go into the same set your builder already reads, so nobody works from a mood board and a phone photo. We have worked with custom home builders on the Gold Coast and in Sydney. We visit at frame stage and again at lock up, because that is when the questions arrive. If you have not appointed anyone yet, we draft.

Resolved in 3D before anyone prices it

A plan is easy to agree to and hard to picture. We build the house in 3D and walk clients through it in virtual reality at full scale. That is where people find the island is 300mm too long, or the ensuite door swings the wrong way.

Finding that in a headset costs an afternoon. Finding it at frame stage costs a variation. That one habit has saved our clients more money than any other part of the process.

New builds we have worked on

Luxxe has completed four residences on the Sovereign Islands, among them homes of more than 4,000 square metres internal floor area and valued at more than $20 million. Custom luxury home design at that scale lives or dies on documentation. There is also the Carrara new build. In Sydney we worked on the Lindfield build and the Fairway Drive Residence, both run from the studio.

The studio also covers kitchen, bathroom and laundry design, home cinema and bar rooms, drafting and renovation work.

Questions people ask before signing a build contract

When should I bring you in? At preliminary plans, before the drawings are locked and priced. If you are already at contract, come anyway. There is still ground to gain in the selections and the joinery.

Do you replace my builder's design team? No. They keep doing the building. We do the interior, and the two sets of drawings sit together.

Can you work with a plan I have already paid for? Yes. A lot of our work starts with custom design home plans the client likes and a nagging feeling that something inside them is not right.

Do you work Australia wide? Yes. Luxxe is an international studio and designs across Australia, with site visits when the program needs one.