Lessons from Local Leaders:

Farzan Jabarri

Lines on Paper, Built Into Life: How Farzan Jabarri Is Changing the Architecture of Northern Virginia — One Modern Home at a Time

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When Farzan Jabarri arrived in the United States from Iran in 2012, he brought with him something most immigrants carry quietly: a trained eye, a set of hard-won skills, and a vision for what things could be. What he found in Northern Virginia was beautiful — lush greenery, rolling hills, the kind of natural landscape that architecture ought to celebrate. What he saw being built on top of it surprised him.

Cookie-cutter houses. Small windows. Dark interiors. Homes that turned their backs on the very landscape that made the land worth building on.

He asked clients about it. He got the same answer, over and over: they loved modern architecture. They just didn’t trust it would hold its value.

That gap — between what people wanted and what they believed they could have — became the foundation of everything Farzan would build next.

From Immigrant to Architect-Builder: A Journey Through the Gap

Farzan had studied architecture before coming to America, but landing in a new country with a professional background that doesn’t automatically transfer meant starting over. He took work at a construction company, learning the American industry from the inside — the materials, the methods, the market. Four years later, in 2016, he launched his own company.

He called it The Big Builders — a name chosen, he admits with a laugh, with more optimism than certainty. The plan was modest: small remodeling jobs, maybe the occasional addition, and if things went really well, perhaps someday a new design.

“I chose the name with a completely different mindset. I never thought that eventually I was gonna lead a design-based boutique firm in Great Falls.”

For five years, he built. He learned. He watched the market. And then, around 2021, something shifted — starting with a decision that most people in his position would never have made.

He bought a small, oddly shaped lot in Arlington. A triangle. No basement. A third floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A rooftop connection where the basement square footage had been redistributed upward, away from Virginia’s rain-prone, mold-susceptible ground level.

It was, by any conventional measure, a weird house. It was listed before construction even began.

It went under contract within a week.

“When you believe in what you do, things happen,” he says simply. And with that one project, everything changed.

The Architecture of Trust

The ripple effect from that Arlington spec home was immediate. Word spread. Clients in McLean gave him the latitude to design modern homes on their properties. Within a radius of a single mile, The Big Builders now has twelve active projects — all of them driven by word of mouth, none of them the result of paid advertising.

That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of what Farzan delivers when a client decides to trust him fully — and because of what he believes about the relationship between trust and outcome.

“The more they trust me, the better I work for them. The less they trust me, the more energy I spend on the trust part, and it distracts me from the actual work.”

This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a philosophy rooted in direct experience. His most celebrated projects — the ones that have landed in Architectural Digest and other major publications — are universally the ones where clients gave him near-total creative latitude. Where they let him design. Let him build. Let him work through the stages that looked, in the moment, alarming or uncertain, trusting that he could see further down the road than the anxiety of the present moment allowed.

Construction, he acknowledges, is inherently frustrating. It’s a process that takes one to two years, that involves phases of visible chaos before the beauty emerges. “There are stages that seem crazy,” he says. “I just ask the client to stay calm and let me handle it. And usually they trust me, and in the end everything turns great.”

Design and Build: Why Doing Both Changes Everything

The design-build model isn’t new. But doing it at the level of craft and intentionality that Farzan brings to it puts The Big Builders in rare company. He estimates they’re among the top three to five firms in Northern Virginia doing truly modern design-build work — a category that demands fluency in both the vision and the execution.

The distinction matters because architecture and construction, when separated, create friction. A designer hands off drawings to a builder who interprets them as best they can. Details get lost in translation. The original vision dilutes with each step down the chain. What Farzan’s model does instead is keep the creative intelligence inside the process all the way through.

“We design a lot of details during construction,” he explains. “We change details, we add details — things that enhance the whole project as it evolves. The client feels like we own the project from the beginning.”

This architect’s eye applied at the construction stage is the invisible ingredient in the quality of the finished work. It’s also the source of the detail-orientation that his team has come to embrace — even when it tips, as he cheerfully admits, into something resembling a professional obsession.

“Every architecture student, over time, develops some kind of OCD that lives with us in our daily life and in our projects. It’s sometimes annoying for the people who work with us, for our family — but my clients love it.”

Rethinking the American Home From the Inside Out

One of the most telling aspects of Farzan’s work is not what he adds to a home, but what he removes.

The formal living room — that placeholder space near the front door that most families furnish once and never actually inhabit — is usually the first thing to go. In its place: a larger family room, opened up and connected to the kitchen, creating the kind of space where people actually live rather than the kind they tiptoe around.

The basement — that damp, dark, expensive square footage that Virginia’s rainfall makes perpetually vulnerable to leaks and mold — gets reconceived entirely. Take those square feet, move them to a third floor, connect them to a rooftop. Light. Air. Views. A home that breathes.

Floor-to-ceiling windows. Courtyard designs that pull natural light deep into the center of a house. Inside-outside connections that make the landscape feel like part of the home rather than something glimpsed through a small pane of glass.

These aren’t aesthetic preferences. They’re a coherent response to a specific environment — Northern Virginia’s light, its greenery, its hills — applied through the lens of someone who arrived here and saw, clearly and without the blinkers of local convention, what was being missed.

“Architecture here was very uniform,” he says. “The trend was really not shifting for decades and decades. But now things are changing. People feel like there’s a market for it, and now they have the courage to build modern homes.”

He sees it as his role to have helped make that courage possible — to have proven, first with his own money and his own risk on that Arlington triangle lot, that a modern home in Northern Virginia wasn’t a financial gamble. It was a sound investment.

A Dream With a Swimming Pool Out Front

Farzan talks about his projects the way architects do when they’re being honest: not just as client commissions, but as opportunities to realize something he’s been carrying around in his imagination, waiting for the right conditions.

He describes a recent project on a hilltop — private, elevated, commanding. It gave him the chance to do something he’d long dreamed about: put the swimming pool in front of the house.

Not in the backyard, tucked away as an afterthought. In front. So that every time you arrive home, every time you pull up the drive, the first thing you see is water and sky.

“It was a long, long dream that I had, and finally it happened. I still have a long list of dreams — but some of them really do happen.”

It’s a small story, told casually. But it reveals something important about how he works: with a running inventory of ideas, experiments, and design ambitions that he’s waiting to match with the right project, the right site, the right client who trusts him enough to say yes.

Building a Brand, One Home at a Time

When Farzan talks about the future of The Big Builders, he does so with the kind of honest ambivalence that belongs to someone who has built something real and knows it.

Some days he thinks about growing. Some days he thinks about stopping where he is. Some days retirement in five years sounds right. Some days he imagines handing the company to his son in twenty.

What doesn’t waver is the standard he wants the name to carry.

“When they hear my name, I want them to feel like this house was made with quality. The Big Builders is now a brand name. I’m working to make it more like a luxury brand — so when they see a home designed and built by The Big Builders, they feel it.”

For someone who arrived in this country in 2012 with an architecture degree, a construction job, and a name chosen optimistically for a small remodeling operation, that’s not a bad place to have arrived.

The houses he’s building now — modern, luminous, deeply connected to the landscape they sit in — are proof that the gap he noticed when he first drove through Northern Virginia was real. And that he was the right person to close it.

Work hard. Believe in yourself. The karma pays back.

He said it at the end of the conversation almost as an afterthought. But for Farzan Jabarri, it’s not a slogan. It’s the operating system behind everything he’s built.

Learn more at thebigbuilders.com or follow the work on Instagram @the_big_builders.

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