Custom design · not stock plans
Custom Barndominium Design
We design every barndominium custom — drawn from scratch around your land and the way you actually live and work. No stock floor plans, no catalog to pick from. Our in-house team designs the plan, we supply the engineered steel kit, and for most buyers we coordinate the turnkey build. The plan answers to you, not the other way around.
What it means
What Custom Design Actually Means
Custom means every plan is drawn from scratch for your site and your household — we do not sell stock floor plans, and there is no catalog to choose from. Most barndominium sellers hand you a set of fixed plans and ask you to fit your life into one of them. We do the opposite: we start with your land and how you intend to use the building, and design the plan around that.
That distinction is the whole point. A stock plan forces compromises before you have even begun — a bedroom where you wanted a shop bay, a porch on the wrong side of the view, a footprint that does not fit your lot. A custom plan starts from your actual constraints and goals, so the building works the way you need it to from day one.
The difference
We Design Custom. We Don’t Sell Stock Plans.
This is what separates us from most of the barndominium market. Stock-plan sellers compete on how big their catalog is. We don’t have a catalog — every plan we produce is original, engineered, and drawn for one site and one household. You are not paying for someone else’s floor plan with your name on it; you are getting a building designed — and engineered — for the way you live, on the land you own.
How we design
Designed Around Your Land and Your Life
A custom plan answers to two things a stock plan can’t: your land and your life. Your land sets the hard constraints — the lot’s shape and slope, soil and foundation conditions, the views and orientation worth designing toward, and the climate and local code the building has to meet. Your life sets everything else — how many bedrooms, how much shop, whether you work from home, store equipment, host family, or all of it.
We take both as the starting point and draw the plan from there, then supply the engineered kit and coordinate the build. The result is a building shaped by your site and your needs, not retrofitted from a template.
What you control
What You Can Customize
Effectively everything that shapes how the building lives and works is yours to set. The most common places buyers make a plan their own:
Permit-ready
Engineered and Stamped for Your Jurisdiction
Your custom plan comes permit-ready — engineered and stamped or sealed by a licensed professional engineer or architect for your specific jurisdiction. Because building requirements vary county to county and state to state, we coordinate the engineering package to exactly what your building department requires, case by case.
Engineering to your site also means engineering to its hazards. In high-wind and tornado-prone regions, we can design the building to wind ratings up to 220 mph — enough to ride out an F3 — and add a dedicated storm shelter or safe room for the most extreme F4 and F5 events, which no full structure can be guaranteed against. Tornado-specific design isn’t required by code for single-family homes, but in tornado country it’s worth building in, and a stock plan won’t account for it.
This is the part of a barndominium a stock plan can’t cover. A downloadable plan isn’t engineered or sealed for your site — your wind and seismic loads, your soil, your local code — so it may not be permittable where you build, and you often find that out at the permit desk. A plan engineered for your jurisdiction clears that hurdle by design.
From plan to building
From Custom Plan to Finished Building
Custom design is the first step in one connected process. Once your plan is set, we supply the engineered steel shell kit built to it — and for roughly nine in ten buyers, we coordinate the full turnkey build through our qualified contractor network, from slab to keys. You can see exactly how that build runs on our how turnkey works page, and what each path costs in our cost guide. Custom applies at every size, too — browse sizes to see common starting points, every one of which we draw to your plan.
Getting started
How to Start a Custom Design
It begins with a conversation about two things: your site, and how you intend to use the building. From there our in-house team draws your plan from scratch — your footprint, your layout, your finish. Once the plan is set, we supply the engineered kit and, for most buyers, coordinate the turnkey build through our network.
The fastest way to start is to request a quote — tell us your state, the size you have in mind, and what you want the building to do, and we’ll take it from there.
FAQ