Moore's Law has been the guiding principle for semiconductor industry to scale down the device size. Consumers have been directly benefited from the ever developed technologies that lead to a faster, smaller, and more reliable performance. In order to preserve the advantages inherited from "scaling-down", researchers have invested into "bottom-up" approach which extends the "leeway" before Moore's postulation reaches saturation. Area-selective deposition (ASD) is an advanced technique to realize bottom-up fabrication as the device feature size shrinks to sub-5 nm scale. On the other hands, conventional top-down process, such as patterning of the substrate followed by selective etching process, tends to result misalignment errors. We have developed a proof-of-concept approach to address the challenge. The approach involves chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in which substrates are exposed to a precursor and a co-reactant. A third reactant termed “co-adsorbate” was utilized to direct growth only occurs on one surface in the presence of another. In this work, 4-octyne was used as co-adsorbate in the CVD of ZrO\textsubscript{2} thin films on SiO\textsubscript{2} and Cu substrates. Expected from quantum chemistry calculation, 4-octyne favors binding on Cu substrate through rehybridization, whereas it only interacts with SiO\textsubscript{2} by van der Waals force. The difference in binding energies affords selective growth.