Designing With Nature

Seawright Homes creates communities where respect for our natural environment is apparent, where both individual homes and overall community have character and where the panorama of streetscape is more pleasing to the senses than any single design element viewed alone. We believe in achieving more through less and through designing with nature.

Form Follows Function

It’s only natural that the company’s role in creating communities that reflect a harmonious visual and physical whole through integration of architectural design and land planning should have a strong ethic of stewardship for land and natural systems. This core value is frequently lacking when responsibility for land planning and architectural design doesn’t reside in a single source. That sense of stewardship for land is a reflection of personal values of Seawright’s representatives, who bring to community building their own interpretation of the design maxim, “form follows function”.

For Seawright Homes that design wisdom has been understood as, “architectural and community design follow land form and natural systems”. It is in direct contrast to the prevailing practice of seeking to maximize lot yield and mass-grading to reshape land to receive repetitive architecture and lot/street layouts imposed with little regard for topography and other natural site features.

The result for our customers has been communities and neighborhoods that reflect a sense of place. From our first community to most current, the communities of Seawright Homes are distinguished by attention to neighborhood scale, preservation of natural topography and site features, landscape architecture, the commissioning of original architecture reflective of both site and surrounding area and the subtle benefits that are brought to community design by attention to color, massing, varied setbacks and the texture of materials. Thus, each new community we create is notable for being an original creation, shaped by and arising from site characteristics, and supported by architectural design and landscape architecture which give rise to the form of community that nurtures our customers’ desire to build and foster a well strong sense of neighborhood and home.

Size Matters

The perspective of Seawright Homes also is shaped by the belief that “size matters”. Size matters in the number of homes we have underway at any particular moment. Beyond a certain organizational capacity, building companies lose sight of the uniqueness of each customer, lose control over quality and are unable to provide the degree of individual attention that we believe each customer merits. Thus, size for the sake of size is not a company objective, whereas customer satisfaction is.

Size matters to Seawright Homes when we consider the scale on which we plan new communities. For us, that’s a human scale, one at which people feel secure and emotionally comfortable in their home and surrounding neighborhood and where proximity to neighbors doesn’t give rise to feelings of isolation or to privacy concerns.

The notion of human scale also comes into play when we consider the number and proportions of rooms contained within a floor plan. We think the number of rooms in a home is a reflection of the number of specific functions of daily life for which space needs to be allocated. Within the space, room area and volume should lend themselves to ease of furnishing, leading residents to want to spend more time in a particular space. What matters to Seawright Homes in architectural design is not how much space is contained in a home, but rather the quality and functional use of space designed.

Size matters with respect to energy efficiency and building green, where the belief that “bigger is better” runs counter to company values relating to energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Throughout the company’s 38-year history, we have built only with 2 x 6 wall construction, instead of 2 x 4, a practice followed by only roughly six percent of the nation’s builders. From the standpoints of energy conservation, resource efficiency and cost-effectiveness it never has made sense to do otherwise.

Seawright Homes has focused on building homes to a size and scale that blend in and appear to belong in their settings, as opposed to building homes that appear to stand out by reason of having size and mass disproportionate to their settings.

When it comes to numbers, the sole measure where size matters to Seawright Homes is the growth in the number of customers who are highly pleased with the home and community we build for them and with their experience in working with us.