Dennis Bucalo knows high-end custom homes

Dennis Bucalo knows high-end custom homes. He has been building them for 20 years, most recently in the prestigious Wynstone community in North Barrington.

"For awhile there, everyone wanted bigger and bigger houses in the custom market. But now I am seeing a shift toward more luxury and less size," said Bucalo, president of Designers and Builders Development Inc. of South Barrington,

"Now we are primarily building homes in the 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot size range, but they are coming equipped with more and more luxurious amenities," he added.

Bucalo said that most custom home buyers are now asking for radiant heat in their basement floors and many are asking for it throughout the house.

He is also getting more requests for patterned stone foyers and many different species of hardwood for other floors. Brazilian cherry and walnut are currently the favorites.

Elaborate custom staircases with wrought iron balusters instead of painted wood balusters are also very popular with high-end buyers, as are elaborate trim packages including wainscoting, coffered ceilings, oversized casings and large, intricate crown moldings, Bucalo said.

Entertainment packages that include whole house music systems and home theaters are also "in", while home intercoms are definitely passé.

Bucalo said that he is definitely seeing a trend away from two-story rooms -- with the exception of two-story foyers, which are still popular. Instead, people are asking for 10-foot ceilings in every first-floor room and 9-foot ceilings on the second floor.

Screened porches and three-season rooms are also "hot," especially those equipped with built-in barbecue pits.

As for the old Chicago stand-by, the finished basement, it is as popular as ever. Even the wealthy want their basements finished and they are spending almost as much on their elaborate bars as they are on their kitchens, Bucalo said. This is also the preferred space for those home theaters and most, but not all, game rooms.

His dream house: A California-style home with stone accents, timbers and lots of class in Costa Rica.

Favorite new home amenity: "I have built a lot of home theaters for clients and they are pretty spectacular. I have been invited to those homes later to see movies and football games and they are really fun." .

Philosophy: "I want to provide a beautiful, luxurious home for each client at an affordable price. I try to find them the best possible deals on materials and pass those savings along to my customers."

His background: Bucalo graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in architecture and worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for several years before moving to Houston to work for a large commercial construction firm for five years. He returned to Illinois in the mid-1980s and worked on the construction of the McDonald's corporate office in Oakbrook before building a home for his family and eventually starting his own residential construction firm in 1987.

Details, details: Bucalo limits himself to two or three homes per year, so his name is not widely recognized. But since the houses he builds and rehabs are in the $1 to $3 million price range, they are time and labor intensive and keep him and his subcontractors quite busy.

In the mid-1990s he built his first community, Fessler's Grove, in Bloomingdale. It was a development of 23 townhouses at Lake Street and Bloomingdale Road. After completing Fessler's Grove, he began building and rehabbing homes within Wynstone, an area that has kept him busy for almost a decade.

He is now building an 11-lot community on 17.5 acres in Barrington called Sunset Estates. The acre-plus lots are sited alongside ponds and a wildlife area on land once owned by Bucalo's aunt and her neighbor. The homes are priced at $1.2 million and up. Sunset Estates is located off of Route 59, approximately one mile north of Northwest Highway.

Buyer profile: "Most of my buyers these days are transferees," Bucalo said. "But they have always been professionals, CEOs, corporation presidents and investment bankers ranging from their mid-30s to their 50s. They almost always have three or four children."

Best part about being a builder: "I enjoy the process of building, I get a thrill from watching it all go together and creating a beautiful environment for people to live in. As an architect by training, I do a lot of the design myself and almost always help the clients make their choices. I have a little artistic flair to me, so I really enjoy all of that."

Future plans: "My son, Dustin, will be graduating from college in January and will be joining me in the business. I am looking forward to teaching him the business and once he is on board, I hope to expand to building maybe six homes a year. There is lots of land available right now as builders who over-expanded fail.

"We will continue to concentrate on higher end custom homes, 4,500 square feet and up. We will continue to limit ourselves to building a small number of homes per year because we want to give our customers lots of personal attention."