Luxury Home Builder: Christopher builds on innovation

After two decades in the business, J. Christopher Stuhmer and his company, Christopher Homes, have become major players in the Las Vegas housing scene, carving out their own niche in the suburban luxury-home market and influencing the design of single-family homes in all price categories.

With new services, a new company, and one of the most prominent spec homes in the Las Vegas Valley, that influence has reached new heights in 2003.

The new services are from the company's custom home division, which recently expanded to offer contractor services including all of the builder's trademark floor plans to any home site in the valley.

Christopher Commercial, the new company, began operations in May, extending Stuhmer's touch to the small-office market. The company is a spinoff of Triad Development, a firm in which Stuhmer was a partner.

And the spec home is the $10 million show home in The Estates at Southern Highlands Golf Club. Built in conjunction with the International Builders Show, it closes its doors this weekend after a five-month public open house. The home is opulent beyond the means of almost everyone, offering the finest amenities and the newest gadgetry.

While few can afford to buy it, the home may prove the most influential of the company's recent projects because it shows off what the company does best: create new "places."

"People want places to go in their home. What we're most doing differently from 10 years ago is creating all these new spaces that are fun," Stuhmer said.

Since the latter 1990s, the company has won acclaim for its innovative designs, which included such "places" as outdoor living rooms with fireplaces and other areas with "indoor-outdoor relationships."

Christopher's design team, which has been together for eight years, includes California-based Scheurer Architects and interior design firm DesignTec, and research firm Market Scapes, as well as the builder's own staff. Together, they form the brain trust Stuhmer relies upon to come up with the next great idea.

"We really look into how people live. We try to wear their shoes at all waking hours," Stuhmer said.

Stuhmer said it's often up to developers to listen to customers' wishes and figure out how to deliver on them.

"Many times through market research, people won't tell you the feature they want, but they'll tell you how they want to live. From there we can make the feature for them," he said.

Some designs come from customer requests. An area such as a laundry room, can be expanded to allow families with dogs to have a contained space within the home just for their pets' needs.

How well space is used, even in a large luxury home, is always a consideration. A seldom-used room, such as a dining room, can double as something else, such as a craft room.

A room sometimes cries out for its secondary use, Stuhmer said. An exercise room, for instance, is good for taking advantage of a view.

"If you're going to spend 4-6 hours a week of your waking moments on exercise equipment, have it be the nice space," he said.

Some designs are counterintuitive. A classic example is the way the company builds dining rooms in its homes. They are large enough for only a typical dinner party, rather than the largest possible gathering the family might host.

"In our homes, the formal dining room only seats eight, which is the opposite of what you might expect," Stuhmer said.

"When people entertain, they might have two or three other couples, which they entertain in the formal dining room, whereas with family gatherings, they might have couple of dozen people over and can't have them all in the dining room."

The sky room represents another departure from convention. It's an upstairs, outdoor area that's covered and bears "a relationship to the outside." It replaces the master bedroom balcony in that it is built to take advantage of the home's view, but it's more useful because residents don't have to send guests through the master bedroom to get to it. It has other advantages, too, such as more extensive wiring and plenty of room for furnishings.

"(The sky room) really didn't come from market research. That came from sessions with our design team. We ask ourselves `if you could create a space, what would you want?'" Stuhmer said.

This point brings Stuhmer back to Christopher Commercial, which builds a type of office space that many small businesses always wanted, but didn't know how to request. As with the home-building business, the idea is to find the functional role and create a product that fills it.

The company's first project, MountainView Professional Park, appeals to a specific segment of the office market: business owners and professionals who want a small office (less than 10,000 square feet), a professional suburban setting, and affordable upscale amenities such as landscaping and signage. Located near MountainView Hospital Medical Center, the project is in a master-planned area with relatively new development.

"It's a whole feeling. Instead of an eclectic collection of buildings constructed over time, you have consistent architecture and features," Stuhmer said.

Incorporating lessons learned from its predecessor, Triad Development, Christopher Commercial opted to offer finished "shells." While some professionals generally liked the idea of controlling the project, most just wanted a turn-key product.

"MountainView is one that will be popular with the medical community because it provides the product they want in the technology corridor near where they need to be. Physicians basically need to spend all their time working because of the medical climate in Southern Nevada. They don't have time to take on a development project themselves," Stuhmer said.

Stuhmer compares the office park to a semicustom-home neighborhood. Much of the appeal is the same: the benefits and pride of ownership, lots of options, and a minimum of hassles.

"It's the same customer profile on both sides of the company. We find the same people who buy our homes are the same people who have an interest in our small business product," he said.

"There's the psychographic component of wanting your own office. It's like the American dream of homeownership. That's a lot of what we do is understanding the psychographics of our customers."

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