Mr and Mrs design-build

Lisa and Joe Bryne are both married to their business. Lisa designs, Joe builds. It’s a highly successful partnership, on both the home front and Auckland’s busy residential building sites.

It’s unusual to see two people achieve close compatibility both in their personal relationship and chosen careers. But that’s exactly what husband and wife Joe and Lisa Byrne have done.
Byrne Homes, based in the new Hibiscus Coast suburb of Millwater, has a mini-dream team in charge – Lisa designs the interiors; Joe’s the Master Builder who oversees the building projects.
It’s a highly efficient and productive combination, producing a multimillion-dollar turnover and seven to nine houses annually utilising contractor partnerships. For Joe, building is in the blood. His dad was a builder. Growing up Joe spent many a school holiday on the end of a hammer. But when he turned 16, his parents’ ultimatum was: “building site or university!”

It was an easy decision, Joe recalls – at uni he studied accounting and IT and later spent time managing a help-desk for an IT company. But studying didn’t come easy – he was happiest when building things or pulling them apart. One day he decided he’d had enough – it was back to the tools with his father.
Joe also met Lisa when he was 16, through mutual school friends. They were married six years later. Lisa wears the design hat for the business, having completed a design degree and several years working as a freelance designer for various magazines including NZ House & Garden and Anna Stretton’s Her Business, and as a freelance photographer. Today she is full-time looking after their children, aged nine and 12, and designing layouts, floorplans, kitchens, bathrooms and colour schemes for Byrne Homes. Joe’s building career has included time with four of New Zealand’s largest house build companies. Three-and-a-half years ago he made the decision to go it alone.
“I’m not very good at doing what I’m told,” he explains. “I have a lot of ideas and in the corporate world you’re just a small piece in the puzzle. My ideas weren’t valued the way I wanted them to be.” Houses have almost become a commodity in the modern world, he adds. It’s no longer the traditional lifetime investment – it’s mostly about quick capital gain. He was sick of the ‘same-old, same-old’; frustrated at the lack of build quality out there and lack of thought or clever design going into houses generally. Often it was simply a case of rooms facing in the wrong direction to capture the sun.
“When you hand over the keys to a new home owner, you want to be genuinely excited for them,” Joe explains. So for Byrne Homes quality and design is paramount.
The couple’s home in Millwater, which doubles as a show home and business office, is a home to get excited about. Finished to a high standard and with Lisa’s unique design stamp, it stands out amongst the neighbouring look-alikes. While most of their ‘design and build’ enquiries come via word of mouth, they’re hoping that by promoting the show home they’ll generate additional business both in and beyond Millwater.

Unique approach Lisa and Joe say their hands-on approach is quite unique in the market. It’s not often the business owner is also project manager and potential builder who sees the build through from start to finish.
“There are not many companies with their own in-house designer who gives the customer the time we do on design,” says Joe, adding that they have a great relationship with a leading architect, which means between the three of them they produce some stunning concepts.
“With all three of us so passionate about creating homes, we end up with some fabulous results,” says Lisa.
Of course, building houses is not all plain sailing – ever-present cashflow challenges can cause sleepless nights – although Joe says creating a ‘cash-float’ with the bank goes some way to easing the stress. However, moving to a model of using contractors rather than having employees has improved productivity, scalability and cashflow.
The next step is to take on a full-time project manager.
Securing the right clients is important too. Trust is important, explains Lisa. “People are entrusting you with all their money to build their home.” “You’re spending a year with these people,” adds Joe. “So it needs to be a really solid relationship.”

An industry stretched Auckland’s housing industry is stressed – poor infrastructure and its sprawling geography are contributing factors, helping push build costs up. It’s 20 percent more expensive to build in Auckland compared to Christchurch, says Joe. “In Christchurch a truck may go from site to tip and back again in 15 minutes; in Auckland it’ll take an hour and a half.”
He’d like to see more developments like Hobsonville where one building company can be responsible for a group of houses and everyone’s on the same page. Economy of scale and efficiency literally goes through the roof.
As for the government’s plan to build 100,000 high quality, affordable homes over ten years, Joe and Lisa have serious doubts on whether it’s achievable, with labour and materials resources already stretched and the industry operating in a value-added vacuum. “The country’s still building houses exactly the way it always did, with the same labour content, so wages remain suppressed,” explains Joe.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing the couple were waiting to hear if their threelevel show home had won an Auckland region medal in the 2018 Registered Master Builders House of the Year awards.
“We’re hoping for a gold,” says Lisa, “but the competition is very tough this year. “Last year we won a gold and won the Auckland category.”
Their home is on a difficult site but optimised for its view, and utilises innovative materials and techniques. “Most points will be scored on complexity and design,” says Joe.
Looking ahead, the couple are aiming to be less ‘hands on’ – more strategically focused, rather than operationally; so the business will continue to function normally if they take a family holiday. (Coincidentally, the week after NZBusiness called, they were about to take a well-earnt break in Fiji.)
“As to whether I actually do achieve that or not – that’s the ideal world,” says Joe. “But I’d love to be in the position where I can do it if I choose to.”