For a long time, luxury housing followed a familiar formula. A strong address, premium finishes, thoughtful architecture, and a polished amenity package were often enough to define value at the top of the market. Those things still matter, but in my experience, they are no longer enough on their own.
What many buyers want now is not simply a more upgraded version of the same product. They want a home that feels more specific to the way they live.
That shift is important because it changes the conversation from features to fit. Better stone, higher-grade appliances, and broader finish packages still have value, but they do not necessarily create a home that feels personal. Buyers are paying closer attention to how a space functions day to day: how they cook, host, work, relax, and move through it. They want homes that reflect those priorities, not just homes that present well on paper.
Historically, that level of personalization was much more common in custom houses than in pre-construction condominiums. In multi-residential development, even at the luxury level, purchaser choice has usually been limited to cosmetic decisions. By the time units are offered for sale, the broader logic of the home is often already fixed.
I believe that is beginning to change.
At Sierra, that thinking informed the “Crafted by You” program at One Ten Avenue Road in Toronto, a boutique condominium development on the Avenue Road corridor near the Annex and Yorkville. The program invites purchasers to work with architect Richard Wengle and one of four design firms — Kim Lambert Design; Mason Studio; Two Fold Interiors; and Kelly Harvey Living — to shape a more individualized home. The scope goes beyond finish selections and opens the door to broader decisions around layout, planning, materials, and overall design direction.
What mattered to us was not simply offering more options. Many builders already do that. What felt more relevant was creating room for more meaningful participation earlier in the process, while there was still something real to shape. In my view, that is where the industry needs to go, particularly at the boutique luxury level, where buyers are looking for something more tailored and more reflective of their own priorities.
That view comes in part from Sierra’s experience across both community development and custom home-building. We have seen firsthand that people want to feel involved in the making of their homes. In a custom home context, that expectation is well-established. In condominium development, it has historically been far less common.
As I have said before, many builders offer only limited options for pre-construction purchasers, but with our experience across high-rise and low-rise development as well as custom homes, we believe there is an opportunity to let homeowners at One Ten Avenue Road tailor their homes to their own preferences. The goal was not simply to expand the list of choices, but to offer a more meaningful process that reflects the reality that many buyers want to be involved in shaping their home from the beginning rather than selecting from a narrow set of pre-determined options.
That shift moves the conversation from choice to participation, and it also changes the role of the designer. Real personalization is not about offering more for the sake of it. It depends on interpretation: understanding how a client wants to live and translating that into space, storage, sequence, materials, and atmosphere. Done well, it requires restraint, discipline, and clarity. The value lies in making better decisions earlier, not in layering on more at the end.
One of the clearest ways we have tried to communicate that idea is through the side-by-side design exercise at the centre of the program. To explain the concept, we asked each participating studio to interpret the same floor plan, creating a direct comparison of how different designers approach the same architectural framework. The result is four distinct schemes shaped by different ideas about materiality, flow, privacy, entertaining, and everyday use.
For me, that exercise reinforces an important point: much of residential design lies not only in the plan itself, but in the way that plan is interpreted. The same square footage can be made to feel formal or relaxed, open or intimate, calm or dramatic, depending on choices around layout, tone, lighting, storage, and finish. Holding the architecture constant makes the designers’ thinking much easier to see.
Kim Lambert describes her concept as “grounded in materiality and expressed in a restrained, refined language,” with the kitchen positioned as “the architectural heart of the home” and designed to feel “intentional and timeless rather than trend-driven.” Veronica Martin of Two Fold Interiors offers a different interpretation, noting that her team “wanted a show kitchen designed as much for everyday living as for entertaining,” layering “warm tones and rich textures” with modern lines and concealed elements to balance livability with sophistication.
What I find compelling in both responses is that neither treats luxury as spectacle. Both are focused on how the home will actually be used, and that, to me, is where the conversation is heading.
The most successful luxury homes are no longer defined only by how they look. They are defined by how well they support daily life. They need to work for hosting, privacy, routine, quiet, and family life with the same level of care. For a growing number of buyers, value lies less in abundance than in fit. A well-designed home is not simply one that offers more, but one that feels resolved around the person living in it.
That is also why buyers today are often more design-aware than they once were. They may not speak in professional design terms, but they are more attuned to the difference between a space that feels generic and one that feels considered. Many are less interested in being handed a finished vision than in helping shape one.
Of course, this does not mean every condominium development should become fully bespoke, or that standardization no longer has a place. But in boutique luxury development, I do think expectations are changing. Buyers are looking for a more personal relationship to the homes they purchase, and the industry will need to respond accordingly.
What this suggests, in my view, is that personalization should no longer be treated as a final layer applied after the major design decisions have already been made. The more useful model is to bring it further upstream, into the design process itself. That creates more room for meaningful collaboration between developer, architect, designer, and buyer, and it leads to homes that feel more thoughtful because they are more closely aligned with how people actually want to live.
The next chapter of luxury housing will not be defined by amenities alone. It will be shaped by how seriously we take the idea that a home should feel personal, considered, and genuinely its own.
Jeffrey Kansun is Managing Partner of Sierra Homes, a builder, developer, owner, and operator of multi‐family, mixed‐use, and commercial properties, with over 35 years of experience creating quality homes and condominiums in Toronto and Southern Ontario, and in select markets in the United States.