Building a Custom Home? Start Here.
What does it really take to create a custom home that reflects who you are and how you want to live? In Episode 119 of The Power of Design Podcast, Wittehaus founder Toby Witte joins Jack Ossa for a candid conversation about designing a modern, energy-efficient luxury home—from finding the right property and defining your vision to navigating the design process and choosing the right builder. They also explore why great architecture is about far more than square footage: it’s about creating spaces that enrich your life. A big thank-you to Jack and the Ossa Studio team for the great conversation! If you’re dreaming of a custom home in the Southeast, this episode is a great place to start.
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About the Episode
From draftsman apprentice to Wittehaus. Toby was born in Lima, Peru, and grew up in Germany, where a three-year drafting apprenticeship taught him to produce a full drawing set by hand before switching to AutoCAD. He moved to Charlotte, graduated cum laude from UNC Charlotte, and ran design-build companies for over a decade before founding Wittehaus.
Why custom homes sit outside the market. Toby explains why he stopped building spec houses. In his view, a truly designed, efficient custom home costs more than banks and the standard real estate market will value it at. His clients go in knowingly, with extra funds, and treat the house as a personal work of art they may later sell to buyers who value the same things.
Supersizing Bliss. Toby wrote the book to change the early conversations with prospective clients. It explains the market forces behind mass-produced housing and offers a different way to think about a home. Toby says that only about 2% of the homes built in the USA involve an architect.
The design process is the client experience. Toby says he could design a home in a far shorter time than the 6-8 month it often takes. The time goes into a diagnostic phase with honest, sometimes uncomfortable questions, a long onboarding that includes the book, concept sketches, and later VR walkthroughs and 1:1-scale floor plan projections, as well as setting up a team of builders, consultants, engineers, and specialists.
Picking the right builder. Wittehaus brings the general contractor in halfway through design for early pricing and feedback. Toby prefers what he calls craft builders, who love how things go together, over spreadsheet builders who push decisions down to subcontractors. Both agree that problems on site are opportunities to protect the design intent without pointing fingers.
The business of architecture. Toby argues that most architects are overworked and underpaid, and that revenue comes from sales, not drawings. His clients pay upfront for each phase, and the firm markets through a web of about 30 channels, from social media and books to talks and events. Jack shares how he sees a small business as a mirror of its owner, why AI democratizes execution, and how Ossa Studio built its own operating system, Maestro, and onboarded its first AI agent, Leo.
