Saad Chehabi has been a businessman for more than three decades. He started his own mosaic tile company and was the supplier for many hotels in Las Vegas in addition to many celebrities’ homes. He parlayed his design knowledge and business acumen to found his own residential construction company, S & R Development, in Dallas in 2002.
“We started out building custom homes in Highland Park and Preston Hollow and have expanded to other areas,” he says. S & R prides itself in giving customers high-quality homes showcasing the company’s attention to detail and style.
“I’m very hands on. I don’t leave a project,” says the SMU graduate and native of Syria. “I run each one personally and cannot spend time away from what I’m working on so I limit the number of projects I take and try to keep them close together.” Currently he has four projects going in the Preston Hollow area, three of which are over 8,000 square feet. His company recently completed a large home in Plano and the homes in PH should be completed by the end of this year and the beginning of next.
“I’m seeing customers wanting less traditional homes these days,” says Chehabi. “New home construction is more about cleaner lines overall.”
“I’m also seeing more steel windows, says Chehabi. They are very elegant but expensive. They add light and can be made into much larger sizes than wood windows due to the strength of the steel. “One of the houses I’m working on right now has an 11-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling window. These windows can add a lot to a house’s value and beauty.”
Chehabi says the clients he works with want their new home to be as energy efficient as possible. This means better insulation than homes had in the past, as well as heating and air-condition systems that sip electricity rather than guzzle.
The Highland Park resident says kitchens he’s building are leaning more toward modern than traditional style. Handles and fixtures are not as busy as they used to be, and people want to use very high-end woods and hardware.
“It’s a lot harder to make a clean-line home stand out,” says Chehabi. Consulting his vast library of design books at his home, Chehabi looks for new ideas to wow his clients and give the luxurious homes they desire.
In high-end kitchens, Chehabi says clients are still using marble countertops, but they tend to be more solid colored than their predecessors with more veins. “White marble and white stone are back in fashion. We’ve also been using some grays, mostly solid grays. As far as flooring, wood is still classic with most people preferring lighter color floors,” he continues.
In the bathroom, Chehabi says he’s using a lot of white marble with free standing tubs. He is installing a lot of oversized rain heads. “We are also building bathrooms with a lot of exposed plumbing; people are interested in that style again. We have installed white marble flooring from Italy or high-end ceramic tile in many of the houses we’ve built recently.”
Chehabi says with Preston Hollow and Highland Park at the point where there are no open lots, he predicts the area around Love Field is going to be the next area to explode with new building. “Plano has been a large growth area too, but it’s getting more and more crowded and people don’t want to commute that far.” The Love Field area has room to grow some and there are houses that can be demolished for new building, he said.
For more information on S & R Development, visit www.srdevelopment.com.
