Would love to do a project like this. Unfortunately not viable in city Centers

> I’ve never seen such incompetence in the tech industry, so perhaps that’s why I was so naive.

I get the sense that real estate in general is an extraordinarily mixed bag with far larger deviations than I’m used. Currently trying to buy a home and some of the solicitors that supposedly do this for a living come across like it’s their first time communicating with a client

This seems like hell (and a control freaks dream).

To be responsible for the design and look of an entire house… I can’t imagine anything more stressful. Especially while having to balance it with a budget

I realize this is a little mean, but if you fashion yourself "competent" in white-collar things it has no or negative relation to a building project, at least in the US (I realize trade culture is different around the world). You need to be a bulldog, and a competent and skilled one in all manor of things, to drive a project like this. Otherwise, that is what you are paying the general contractor to do, and that is the most important person on your job - beyond the architect, and especially vanity consultants. This person made a huge mistake in not being 100% comfortable with their builder before embarking.

Most of this heartache could be avoided with two principles in my opinion: 1) do the harder thing (i.e. pour concrete), 2) build as close to commercial code as you can afford (i.e. find a commercial builder if you are chasing specs like this, a mechanical company to do this vanity HVAC work, etc).

> I’ve never seen such incompetence in the tech industry, so perhaps that’s why I was so naive.

How

This is very nice! I love passive houses, although much of the advice is for the US, not for Europe.

Something really nice I saw recently at a friend's house in Amsterdam, it's a Qettle, a faucet which is able to dispense boiling water instantly! Fully electric, using induction. And I was thinking about this recently, because where I live in Portugal, for the shower and the kitchen's faucet, share a boiler, which it's in the kitchen. If the faucet didn't need it, the heating could be way closer to the shower, making my shower hotter!

I run electrical work for a living, I could easily GC my own house build. I’d still pay an architect and a general contractor if I was going to have one built.

Also, the incompetence the author experienced is because virtually all of the skilled and smart tradespeople are doing commercial work, or they’re booked a year out.

My family undertook a major renovation where we basically took down everything above the foundation and started from scratch. I went down many of the exact same rabbit holes as the OP and the results ended up being very similar. My takeaway was that the majority of the people working in the home building trades are very closed-minded and are terrified of doing anything that veers too far from the way homes have been build in the US since the middle of the 19th century.