By Martin Sinderman
Contributing Writer

A focus on quality enabled a residential builder and a mixed-use developer—both based in the Charleston area—to garner top-level honors in a nationwide competition.

This past January, the National Association of Home Builders and Professional Builder magazine recognized Kiawah Island-based custom-home builder Buffington Homes L.P., with platinum (tops in the nation) “Best in American Living Award” honors for Best One-of-a-Kind Custom Homes in the 4,001- to 6,500-square-foot and the 6,501-square-foot and larger categories.

At the same time, Daniel Island, Charleston’s 4,000-acre planned mixed-use live/work/play community, was also honored with a platinum BALA for being the nation’s “Best Suburban Smart Growth Neighborhood/Community” for 2004.        

Quality construction

Buffington Homes’ winner in the 4,001- to 6,500-square-foot custom category was a home dubbed “Color Me Kiawah.” Built on a small marsh-front lot on Kiawah Island, this three-level home, whose hard construction cost totaled $234 per square foot, nestles into a 10-foot-high sand dune, and features an attached guesthouse, front and rear balconies, and an ocean viewing loft which the owners have nicknamed the “storm tower,” and use for watching the thunderstorms which often form in the evening, according to Buffington partner Cathy Buffington.

Meanwhile, “Childhood Memories—Re-created,” the company’s winner in the 6,501-square-foot and up category, was built for owners seeking a Kiawah Island home that incorporated the design elements of the diverse, “melting pot” neighborhood of their childhoods with close attention to construction detail and the ability to withstand the environmental rigors of an oceanfront location. The result was a $473-per-square-foot home Buffington describes as “truly lovely—but also battleship-like” when it comes to being ready for hurricanes, daily ocean winds and humidity.

Buffington and her husband, Dan, began their building career in 1985 by developing in a tough California marketplace. They began their custom home building business here in 1997, and have since focused on building luxury homes in Lowcountry locales including Kiawah, Seabrook, Wadmalaw and Sullivan’s islands, as well as Isle of Palms and Mount Pleasant.

That’s a growing segment locally, and a demanding one when it comes to quality, Buffington says.

“We build every home as if it were our own, and we make sure none of our project managers have more than two projects in progress at any given time,” she says. “In this market, you have to maintain the highest quality in your work because you are competing with individuals that have been building good homes here for 25 years.”

Smart growth done right

Meanwhile, creating a quality environment for a multiplicity of uses has been the key to success for Daniel Island, according to Daniel Island Associates LLC Chief Operating Officer Matt Sloan.

“Protecting natural resources, providing parks and open spaces for people to gather, incorporating housing at a variety of price points—all in a pedestrian-friendly setting—has proven to be profitable,” says Sloan. He adds that in the case of Daniel Island and similar developments across the nation, “The level of profitability depends on the quality of execution and, even more importantly, on the location.”

With more than one million square feet of existing commercial space designated for retail, office and institutional use; 1,500 completed housing units priced from the low $100,000s to the several millions; and another 1,000 residential units in various stages of the development pipeline, “Daniel Island has long since moved past the pioneering stages,” Sloan says, “and is now at the point in its evolution where the balance of uses we’ve put in place are feeding off one another.”

In the challenges department, “All the communities like ours that I’ve looked at around the country seem to struggle with one of the (land) use types, and in our case, the hardest thing for us has been building a successful retail corridor,” says Sloan. “We’ve had reasonable success to date because of our proximity to the rest of the Charleston metro area and, obviously, to the Mark Clark Expressway. But retail is a challenge that still lies ahead for us.”

The recent BALA award “represents recognition of our decade-long effort to put together the different components of smart growth, and we are pleased to serve as an example of that form of development,” adds Sloan. “The goal of Daniel Island from the start was to be a natural extension of the city of Charleston, not just another suburban bedroom community—and I think we’ve been successful, and that we are an important part in the local economy.”

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