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They say you can’t change others; you can only change yourself. That’s why, when the real estate market began a downturn last year, the high-end developer Gulick Group created a new class of homes that would sell in a soft market.
The resulting New American Series homes in Brambleton, VA, are smaller and lower in price than most of Gulick’s homes, yet they retain many details of their much bigger cousins.
“We had today’s buyer and today’s market specifically in mind when we started designing this [series],” says founder Peter Gulick. “We felt there would be some downward pressure on pricing so we aimed for a smaller product that’s as good as anything we’ve ever built.”
An average Gulick home costs about $1.5 million (and can go up to $4 million), but the Ashcroft model from the New American Series is priced at a remarkable $742,900. For that, a buyer will get four to six bedrooms and three-and-a-half to five-and-a-half bathrooms. They will also see the designer details that are present in Gulick’s larger homes.
“This house has everything you get in an 8,000-square-foot house [that sells] for $2 million,” Gulick says. It’s just smaller.
Just Start at the Front Door
A circular staircase might be common in a 12,000-square-foot home, but not in a home the size of the Ashcroft, which is 3,226 square feet.
The kitchen and family room were designed to be airy and open. Because one can see all the rooms in the first floor from the kitchen sink, “it feels bigger than it is,” says Peter Gulick’s son, Jamie Gulick, the company’s director of sales and marketing.
The Gulicks are able to offer such details because of the way they build all their homes. With a design center on site, customers don’t need outside sources for any material that goes into the home.
In the Ashcroft, for example, customers can choose structural and interior design features from a 30-page menu that offers more than 7,000 options. Peter says: “Our niche is to provide the exclusivity and the upscale effect in finishes and spaces that a custom home often provides, with the economy of scale of a production home.”
