Custom Homes Built Around How You Want to Live
The word custom is used loosely in this industry. It often means choosing finishes from a catalog or adjusting a floor plan that someone else designed. At Ceci Bates, custom means something different. Every home we build begins with a conversation about how the people inside it actually want to live — and from that conversation, an entirely original home is designed for a specific owner, a specific piece of land, and a specific way of life.
Designed from
the Land Up
Every Ceci Bates project begins with the land. Before a single line is drawn, the design team studies the lot — where the sun rises and sets across seasons, where the best views are, how the terrain falls, and where the natural approaches to the home create the strongest sense of arrival. The orientation of the home, the placement of every window, and the relationship between interior and exterior spaces are all driven by what the site itself offers.
For a lakefront property, that means positioning the most important living spaces to face the water and capture the light as it moves across the surface. For a wooded lot, it may mean designing the home around the trees that define the property’s character — preserving the canopy rather than clearing it. For open acreage, it means understanding how the home sits in the larger landscape so that it feels rooted rather than dropped.
The homes we build are not sealed containers placed on top of the ground. They are designed to engage with the environment around them — covered porches that extend living space outdoors, kitchens that open directly to outdoor cooking areas, primary suites with windows positioned to catch the first light of morning. The relationship between inside and outside is not an afterthought. It is one of the first things the design team considers, because for most of our clients, the connection between their home and the land it sits on is the reason they chose this place to begin with.
Lake Homes, Ranch Properties,
and Everything Between
Lake & Waterfront Homes
Lake homes are the creative heart of what we do. These projects are often less restricted by subdivision covenants, which gives the design team more freedom to create architecture that is truly unique to the site. The terrain around Lake Texoma demands it — steep slopes, cliff-side lots, wooded bluffs, and irregular property lines all present challenges that require structural creativity and engineering precision. The result is a home that does not simply sit beside the water but belongs to its landscape.
Homes on Acreage & Ranch Properties
Not every custom home is a lake house. We build for clients on twenty acres of ranch land, for families on quiet rural roads with views that stretch to the tree line, and for owners of working agricultural properties who need structures that serve both their livelihood and their home life. These projects often involve additional structures — horse barns, equipment buildings, workshops — designed with the same care and engineering discipline as the residence itself.
Subdivision & Community Homes
Some of the finest custom homes in this region are built within covenanted communities like Rock Creek, where architectural standards ensure that every home contributes to the character of the neighborhood. Building within covenants requires a different kind of design skill — the ability to create a home that is unmistakably original while meeting the community’s standards for materials, setbacks, and architectural style. We are an approved builder in several of these communities and bring the same site-specific design approach to a subdivision lot that we bring to a thousand-acre ranch.
Contemporary & Traditional
We do not have a signature style. Some of our clients envision stone facades with timber accents and covered porches. Others want clean lines, flat roofs, and walls of glass. What we bring to every project is the same design philosophy — start with the land and the client, not with a template — and the same standard of construction quality, regardless of the aesthetic. The range of our completed work reflects this: warm rustic kitchens with exposed beams alongside sleek modern great rooms with double-height ceilings and statement lighting.
What Custom
Actually Looks Like
A retired couple came to us with what sounded like a simple request: a home with a shop where they could work on their cars. They build show-quality VW Bugs — restore them, paint them, trailer them to shows across the state. They are in their mid-sixties, they love what they do, and they wanted a home that supported their life rather than treating their passion as something to be housed separately.
The conventional approach would have been to build a house and a detached garage. Instead, we proposed something different: integrate the shop into the home itself. A pass-through from the kitchen leads directly into a heated, cooled, and insulated garage with a bay that opens to the rear yard. In warm weather, they open the doors for cross breeze, fire up the outdoor kitchen, and work on their cars with friends while the house is right there — not across a parking area, not in a separate building, but part of the same structure they live in.
The integrated approach actually cost less than building two separate structures. Shared walls provided better insulation. The heating and cooling system serves the entire building. And the home does exactly what it was designed to do — it lets two people live the way they want to live, every single day.
We advocated for this design with the client's bank, which initially resisted financing a combined structure because the appraiser had never seen one. We made the case that the integrated shop adds value to the home — a future owner could park a boat where the cars are now. The bank agreed.
This is what we mean when we say custom. Not a granite countertop selected from a catalog. A home conceived entirely around how the people inside it want to spend their time.
Homes That Tell the Story
Every home we have built is unique to its owner and its site. These are a few that illustrate the range of what custom building looks like across this region.
The Grand Lakehouse
Every room opens to one covered patio. Architecture shaped around the evening that brings everyone outside.
View Project →The Mountain House
A Colorado lodge reimagined for the Texas lakeside. Stone and cedar from the foundation to the roofline.
View Project →A thousand private acres. Built for gathering.
In Their Own Words
It Starts with How You Want to Live
If you have a piece of land, an idea for a home, or simply a sense of how you want the next chapter to feel — that is enough to begin. The first conversation is about what matters to you. Everything else follows from there.
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