I Built a $5,000,000 Mansion

A few years back I bought a half acre lot in one of the best neighborhoods in Arizona and I put together a team to take on what would be one of my favorite projects yet. There was an old house that was sitting here when I bought this lot. It was built back in the 1960s and I'm not going to lie it was a pretty cool house but it did leave a lot to be desired when you compared it to more modern standards. So after spending a bunch of time fine-tuning details we got plans approved to build a new house where the old house used to be. The project is finally 100% finished and in today's episode I'm going to show you guys around. The new home is a 4,500 square foot contemporary style house and there are some crazy elements here including $80,000 worth of wood installed both on the outside and on the great room ceiling. It's got a chef's kitchen with some of the highest end cabinetry you can get. There are five bedrooms inside with four and a half bathrooms. One of those bathrooms which is accessed through a secret door in a living area. I'm sure a lot of you regular viewers have a bunch of questions for me because I don't talk about my personal life a whole lot here on the channel. I'm going to do my best to answer all of your questions today. Let's take a walk around together. Of course I'll be showing off all the design details but I also want to get into some of the more construction related decisions that were made along the way here to build what I think is the coolest house on the block. So I love how the house turned out as far as the curb appeal is concerned and you've got this exposed aggregate concrete that kind of leads you up to the front gate which takes you into the courtyard. We have some unique architectural elements but what was most important was to go really high with the ceilings which you guys are going to see in a second because out those four windows that you see above the sliders you're looking directly at Camelback Mountain which is kind of one of the most prominent features that you get like with any house that you can build here in this part of the city. Another detail here we have a mix of two different finishes on this house. The first is just a white synthetic stucco. It's a smooth stucco. It's a really nice modern look but then to warm things up a little bit we put this wood which wraps this two-car garage and then it also wraps a section of the exterior in the backyard. It was actually really tough to pick what type of wood should go on the outside of this house. We're in Arizona. The sun is very intense out here and so we went with a hardwood called Red Grandis and then we had to seal it with this Penofin sealer which has an SPF in it kind of like a sunscreen and so it makes this wood a lot more durable and a lot more long-lasting. The wood itself is a hardwood then the Penofin sealer protects it a little bit from the sun. Now let's go through this gate and I want to say that I was a little bit resistant to doing this like kind of mesh rusted gate in the front of the house. The biggest reason I was resistant to it is I wanted some privacy like we've got a glass pivot door behind me and then another big 16-foot sliding glass door over here but my designer Joel who's awesome was very adamant that we do this. He wanted to break up the courtyard materials. We have block wall over there which you guys are going to see in a second. So this just it makes the courtyard feel I don't know like a little bit more open and airy and then we have all this vine which is growing up the gates surrounding the courtyard so you still have that privacy but you've got a little bit more airflow and you don't feel like you're in a prison. So spinning around this way this section of the courtyard there's a gas burning fire feature looking straight out at Camelback Mountain. I'll show you guys one unique detail here that we needed to install which is a drain on the front side of this fire pit which believe it or not takes water about 85 feet away over to the north side of this lot and then drains it out into a wash which is in the backyard and then headed over this direction behind this gate you've got the swimming pool and I actually personally would have preferred for this all to be open where the courtyard and the swimming pool are all in one big open area but we had to put this gate in because basically every door which has direct access to the swimming pool is required to have a self-closing latch on it so if we didn't put this fence and gate up then we would have had to have self-closing latches on this big 16 foot slider plus the pivot door and you don't want something like that on your entry door. The swimming pool in the front yard is possibly the most unique or unusual feature about this house and this is another thing that I was a little nervous about initially but this house actually is technically a remodel according to the permit which means that something stayed one of those which was the existing slab of the old house and the second thing that stayed is this unique shaped swimming pool which was located in the front yard. The pool has of course been completely rehabbed so it's got new plumbing new electrical new pebble tech new steps new waterline tile new coping everything about this pool is basically like a new pool but it is an oversized diving pool which I think is pretty cool it helps it to run a little bit cooler in the summertime out here in Arizona a lot of these newer pools that people are putting in just feel like a bathtub when you jump into them when it's like 110 degrees outside. On the back side of the swimming pool we have a nice oversized gas burning fireplace here a huge countertop for bar seating behind the fire pit and then a little outdoor kitchen area over here behind me and then another feature that we added to this swimming pool which was not existing is a heater because this is the most beautiful time of year here in Arizona where you've got highs in the 70s and lows in the 40s but it means that your pool gets basically freezing so we've got a heater on this one it's an important feature for buyers who want to use their pool more year-round this thing's huge it's six foot wide by eight feet tall this leads you directly into a massive great room so this great room here is actually about 2,000 square feet which is pretty crazy that's about the size of my entire house at home but it's it's all open so the main living space is here with the tv over there you've got a little seating area here which breaks up your living space with your kitchen and dining room nice big dining room over here with seating for 10 and then in this quarter of the great room we have a temperature controlled wine room which it looks very simple but it was a very complicated part of this build it's something that I'd actually never done before but there's a lot of complex elements to pulling something like this off the first which is the glass the glass needs to be upgraded so that it's able to maintain the cold temperature that is going on inside of this room all those pins that you see they're hanging out of the shinoki cabinet material holding all the wine bottles needed to be spaced out perfectly so we had to make a custom jig for that and then the cooling unit that you see on the ceiling is basically like an ace unit that turns this room not just into an air-conditioned room but basically into a big refrigerator so I'm really stoked about how that turned out you look at places that just need to be completely remodeled land or what are you looking at these days the initial plan with this house actually was not to tear it down because the old house was a good size it was 4500 square feet and it was a pretty good floor plan so a few walls needed to come down to open it up but the initial plan when I first made an offer here was remodel the house this year and then during that due diligence window as we started to look more at the plan and look more at the existing conditions the old house this became obvious right away that the best use for this lot was to tear the old house down almost entirely and build a new one and the biggest reason for that is the ceiling height in the old house was very low and so we needed to get these 16 feet ceilings we didn't need to go 16 feet but we needed to get to at least 12 feet to be able to capture the mountain views and so the best way to do that was just tear the old house down okay I'm having a hard time deciding what we should even talk about next so let's just look at the wood ceiling for a second this is that same red grandus material that I showed you guys out front we covered the entire great room ceiling in this material which was very entertaining to watch the guys install because these ceilings are 16 feet tall and so they had this whole assembly line where they were basically installing one board at a time they had like six guys up on scaffolding in here knocking the board in and then installing the next board and then knocking that one in with a bunch of these like rubber hammers but it turned out amazing we sealed it with that same sealer that you see on the outside so believe it or not this is just a clear sealer so this is actually kind of just the natural color of this wood it's just enhanced a little bit and it brings out a lot of the redness in the wood when you put this clear sealer on it and then running the wood in this direction was done for a few reasons but one thing I really like about it is the fact that it's running towards the east like this sort of draws your attention towards those camelback mountain views that's one of the biggest selling points of this house for sure is that you have just dead-on camelback mountain views they're unobstructed you're not looking at any other houses or power lines and if you guys notice on top of the camelback mountain views looking this direction you're also looking back out at those metal great courtyard walls with all the vines growing up them and then over here is your direct access to the swimming pool flipping back to the other direction I want to show you guys the kitchen here in a second but first I just want to give a shout out to the stagers I think they did an absolutely amazing job staging this room I actually thought it would be pretty challenging to stage this room because like I said it's a huge room it's 2,000 square feet and it's just kind of one big open room so before there was furniture in here it was really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of like where everything would go and how this room would fill in okay so kitchens next there's so much that I have to say about this kitchen I am just absolutely obsessed with how all the finishes go together in here starting with the island this is an oversized island it's funny like anytime I do one of these projects I always tell the designer design the kitchen with the biggest island we possibly can and then go even bigger this one we were able to squeeze an island that's 15 and a half feet long which it's oversized I don't know if it's picking up on camera but it's awesome I'll show you a detail here while we're in this corner that something unique that the designer called out here was kind of a waterfalled reveal with the shinoki cabinetry where you typically have a waterfall with the countertop material itself but here we actually use the cabinetry to create the waterfall the face of it runs along the front side of the island and then this countertop which is a quartzite material actually kind of floats over the cabinetry and we've got this little shadow gap in between which also has the quartzite tucked up in there I think this detail turned out so nice it was definitely challenging for both the cabinet makers and for the countertop fabricators to pull off but they did an awesome job it turned out great another thing you're going to see is the under cabinet lighting so we have led under cabinet lighting where your knees go here under the island itself and then behind that shelf in the back right above the pot filler above the island you're going to see these four pennant lights which are super simple minimalistic sleek and this is another thing that I discovered I actually had never built a house before with 16 foot ceilings the original light fixtures that were called out didn't fit here because they only dropped like five feet and so the pennants themselves would have been way too high so we actually had to have the designer find a different pennant light that's got a drop of like I think we're 10 feet on this drop here so it brings the pennants a little bit closer to the island it just feels appropriate and even though this was a backup choice I absolutely love these things so behind these cabinet doors here is what's called an appliance garage I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen this before so this is pretty cool so you can actually open up the cabinets tuck the doors back like this there's an outlet in here which in hindsight we probably should have had four outlets in here but it's okay you can put an extension cord or we could add a few outlets later but the idea here is if you notice the same countertop that you see everywhere else in this kitchen is inside of this cabinet so the purpose of this cabinet is it kind of gives you a place to put your appliances you can put your keurig your instapot your whatever else inside of this cabinet so all your appliances are out on the countertop ready to use every morning but you don't have to look at them because they're kind of an eyesore you know fast forward to the day that you close as soon as you close on the house or even really before you close on the house you're already working on designing the new house and so you're going through the process with putting together your team of either architect or draftsmen all of your consultants or your engineers and then your designer and collectively all of these people together come up with what the house is going to look like from the street what the floor plan is going to look like and then you know we through the course of several meetings and several weeks you come up with a final look of the house and look and kind of flow of the house and then it's a big waiting game from there because you've got the architect who needs to put together their set of blueprints part of that process is they need to talk with a bunch of consultants you've got your civil engineer you've got your electrical engineer your mechanical engineer your structural engineer and all these people are very busy so the process after closing is a lot of waiting it's a fun phase of getting to go through that design process and then waiting around on the architect and engineers and then once they have the package together you submit to the city and then it's more waiting around waiting for the city to approve your plans but in total from the day you close until the day you're able to start building you're usually looking at like six months okay and so you're going to notice that this same quartzite material is all over the kitchen we've got it here on the island in the appliance garage over here as the countertops also we use it for backsplash also above the backsplash we have this little four inch shelf which just gives you a place to put your spices or your knickknacks and then we also put it here on the hood surround which was not easy to pull off we had to build a big steel structure in order to do this but it just kind of ties the whole kitchen together and i love how it turned out the pot fillers over here i've noticed in the comments of some of my past videos that some of you guys actually have not seen or heard of pot fillers this is a pretty common feature in higher end kitchens it's actually not all that challenging to pull off as long as you think about doing this in your early design phase and then you run the water lines obviously through the wall to make this work but the purpose of this thing is to literally just fill up your pots and not have to fill up your pots all the way over here and then carry them over the range because come on that's just way too much work for appliances we've got a 48 inch thermador range over here you're going to notice we went with the panel ready appliances on the dishwasher the fridge and the freezer and then something else cool that i'll show you guys if you haven't seen one of these before is a microwave drawer microwaves i feel like are an eyesore too kind of like the rest of your appliances so in order to open this thing you just push a button the microwave drawer opens up some people argue that these are not the most functional because now you're going to have to like put your items in and out of the microwave like this but you got to admit it's a pretty sleek look next i'll show you guys what's behind this secret door right here so wrapping this volume in the great room we decided to use that same red grandis material but here we actually went with a very very dark stain it almost looks like it's painted black but you can still see some of the veins coming out in the wood which is what we were going for but then behind this door this is a secret door which leads you to the powder room so this is the bathroom that your guests are going to use i love all the details in here the floating vanity the wall mounted chrome faucet i love how the designer called for the backsplash to go from countertop halfway up the mirror so we had to shim this mirror out a little bit in order to pull that off but i think it just turned out super cool so yeah with that other project that i was documenting here on the channel quite a bit that one actually ended up going way faster than i ever could have imagined as soon as the project finished in fact i didn't even have the certificate of occupancy yet and we put the house on the market and we immediately hooked buyer within like four days so all went very fast this buyer wanted to close quickly it was a cash buyer and so i was in this position of i need to get the cfo i need to get the house ready for this buyer we went through the inspection process and they of course had a handful of items that they needed to have addressed so back at that time like the last thing on my mind was filming videos about this house even though i know a lot of the viewers were probably interested in seeing the finished product over there to me it was like okay i need to get my priorities in a row and my priority right now is like get this house ready for these buyers not to mention i never talked about it here on the channel before but i was also just deep into this project while all that one was happening so i was trying to get that one ready for the new buyers this one was coming up on the tail end of this construction timeline which is the busiest part of the phase for sure so i never even had the chance to show this one off and i never got the chance to show the finished product over there so i feel like the timing of this video is kind of perfect okay so now we've got kind of two wings to this house it's only 4,500 square feet but there's two wings this one would be the south wing and down this hallway we have access to both of the garages the laundry room the drop zone and one bedroom which is kind of like a junior master suite so let's check out the bedroom first like i said this could be marketed as an office or a junior master suite because it is the only bedroom on this wing of the house this of course got its own walk-in closet every bedroom in this house actually has direct access to one of the patios so every bedroom comes with its own sliding glass door this one has got a really nice oversized private patio and then let's just take a look at the bathroom in here really quick i love all the tile details in here one of the many things that my designer is really good at is sourcing tiles that all go well together and this tile in particular has a great texture to it it actually came from japan it took like four months to get this stuff i was actually a little bit concerned too about how we'd be able to grout it because of the texture but it turned out amazing and then another detail that you'll see in the showers of all these bathrooms in this house is that they are depressed or curbless during the construction process we needed to recess the concrete in the shower pan areas so that you have that seamless access with no curb okay so next on this wing of the house remember we've got the laundry and the drop zone so some of you guys like chloe have maybe never heard of a drop zone before this is a drop zone this from what i understand was coined actually by a local developer like 10 years ago or so but this is kind of the area this right behind your garage which gives you a place to sit down and kick off your shoes hang up your hat or your coat or your umbrella or whatever and then obviously we've got a lot of floor-to-ceiling storage here too and then right off the drop zone is probably my favorite room in the house oddly enough and this is a lot of people's favorite room in the house this is the laundry so it's very spacious we've got double washers double dryers behind these cabinets here is an av closet so this is where all the av wiring is stored and this is what powers all the speakers in the house and then you can see back here we use some more of that under cabinet led lighting under this shelf which is the same material as the cabinetry that you see down here ties it together really nicely and i also like here how we use two different types of backsplash below and above that shelf i know garages aren't the most exciting spaces in the world but i want to show you guys something really quick there's two two-car garages in this house the first one's right here for one the epoxy flake flooring in here turned out so so good we used a mix of white black gray and then some specks of brown which kind of tie in all that wood material that you see throughout here by the way sorry about the echo another cool factor about this garage is these three windows which give you a little peek at that mountain and then both of these two-car garages in this house are temperature controlled which you don't really need this time a year but it's a really nice perk when it's 120 degrees out here in phoenix you can cool these garages down to like 75 or 80 degrees it just makes for a more comfortable experience for the owners i've always worked with a general contractor on every project i've ever done i've been doing this 13 years i've done 20 or 25 projects in total now flips new builds a little bit of everything i realized through these last couple of projects with this being probably my busiest year yet that i am ready to kind of like step onto the front lines and get my license so i went through that process as well over the last six months i started studying i went to an online school and i buckled down and i actually officially as of a couple weeks ago have my license and so going forward i'm pretty excited because i will be able to be the general contractor on my jobs i'll be able to be in the driver's seat i'll be able to be my own superintendent and be in control of the subs that are hired and be in a lot more control of the timeline and so that's definitely a huge step for me in terms of my development career and yeah now down this hall we have three bedrooms to our left and then the master bedroom to our right this bedroom has its own ensuite bath and then these two bedrooms here share this bathroom which has got a shower and a tub and then over this direction is the master suite which i think just turned out so great because you've got room for your bed over here in this corner you've got room for a little seating area over here another shout out to the stagers for just picking out some of the coolest furniture and we have an oversized slider right here which gives you direct access to your swimming pool and then of course more views of camelback mountain and then one more thing i want to show you guys really quick before we go check out the master bathroom and that is this so we actually installed motorized blinds on a handful of the windows and sliders throughout this house so check this out you guys might not be able to tell here through the camera but these things are completely silent you can barely hear them running and this just gives the buyers the idea of what it would be like to have a motorized slider package throughout the entire house if they choose to go with this upgrade when they buy the house we can do it to all the windows and sliders because that's another thing that we did during the framing part of this process or really during the low voltage phase is we pre-wired all the windows and sliders to be set up for motorized shades if the buyer wanted that okay now over here we've got the master bathroom so here we've got the floating vanities which i just absolutely love how this turned out we have this oversized 12 inch reveal on the countertop material this is the same countertop that you saw in the kitchen we've got floating vanities again which we did for all of the bathroom vanities in this house that's another one of those things that you really have to think through during the pre-planning phase and during the framing phase you have to install some backing here to ensure that these countertops and cabinets are nice and secure to the wall we got these matte white wall-mounted faucets in this bathroom as well which turned out great and then over to my right here is a shower it's kind of like a car wash style shower you got a couple shower heads over here a couple more over here on this wall the tub in the back with a nice shelf that runs wall to wall and then of course another window looking out to the mountain and then last back here is the master closet i really wanted to squeeze an island in this closet it wasn't quite big enough for that but that's okay it's still tons of storage we went with the upgraded package that goes floor to ceiling with your storage in here which yes you're not going to be able to reach up to those upper shelves but that's kind of where you put probably like your winter shoes or whatever and there's another rack on this side of the closet which gives you a bunch more shoe storage and then we installed a full length mirror on the back side of this closet door which i think is just kind of a nice touch if you don't know the phoenix area we're basically adjacent to arcadia which is one of the most sought after neighborhoods in town we're on the south side of camelback mountain which is becoming the second most desirable pocket to be in town and one thing i really actually like about this exact house and the finished product is in my opinion it's the coolest house in the neighborhood for sure but it's actually also the most affordable house in the neighborhood because it's on the smaller end it's 4,500 square feet which allows us to be priced where we are you look at every other house in this neighborhood and the prices range from seven million all the way up to 30 million dollars all within walking distance of this house which is pretty crazy so if a buyer particularly an out-of-state buyer is looking in this neighborhood on zillow and they see this one priced at five million and then they see everything else around it priced at seven ten thirty million dollars this one kind of looks like a bargain i guess instead of just telling you guys about the neighborhood we can just drive around real quick and show you around so like for example right up here this is like three doors down basically from our house a new home is being built and this is on a huge lot here this one's probably gonna end up being something like 7,000 square feet in total i think they actually might be going up to two stories on this house but you can just see how big it is can you do two stories here well there are height restrictions with my lot i don't know if that same lot has those same height restrictions so they might be allowed to go two stories it looks based on the framing that they're going two stories this one here actually though this is an even bigger lot it looked like they were trenching for a basement as like six months ago or something so phoenix is on this like grid system where all the roads are basically straight east and west or straight north and south but since we're hillside here you've got a lot of winding roads that kind of take you into different pockets of the mountain this house here is for sale on this one they're asking i think 7.25 million this one over here to the right this one sold quite a while ago but you can see it's a nice big modern house that one's probably a 10 million dollar house now up here on the side of the hill there are a bunch of modern homes that have been built over the past like five years or so all those ones are purchased so high up in the mountain though they have amazing views so you know you're gonna pay a premium for that there's a castle at the top of the mountain also which would make for a fun video someday that thing's been in construction for like 15 years or something this lot here to my left this is like a four acre absolute compound this guy spent like 10 years building this house there's no way we can even get a look at it because of all these hedges but this is a big one headed down this way we have a house that recently sold for eight million dollars and it was funny because the buyer of this house completely tore out the landscaping and redid it he probably spent a couple hundred thousand dollars just on landscaping alone after he spent eight million dollars on his new house that was just a remodel too by the way this is one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood one of the biggest builders in town did this one his name is rich realtors have estimated that that house is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million dollars as is but the owners aren't selling this is their forever home the point of showing you guys this is this is a strong neighborhood there's a lot going on in here a lot of development there's a lot of people who are spending a lot of money in this neighborhood the house is now listed for sale it's been for sale for about six weeks or so as of the filming of this video and the feedback's all been really positive people absolutely love the house itself they love the floor plan they love the neighborhood they love the location they love the views so the feedback's all been really positive the timing hasn't been the greatest because of where interest rates were at the elections now it's the holiday season so no offers yet but we anticipate that's coming at some point in the future