Sunnyvale’s custom home builder.

A build goes sideways when decisions get made late. We front-load the ones that are hard to reverse and leave the reversible ones for when you have seen the space.

Weather is the variable nobody controls. A wet spring can cost weeks on dirt work before the pad is even ready, and there’s no version of the job where you pour a foundation into saturated ground and get away with it. I build float into the schedule for exactly this, and when it runs out I tell you rather than quietly compressing the finish phase to protect a date. A house rushed through trim and paint shows it for the next thirty years.

Setbacks, easements and whatever the HOA reviews will shape the footprint before you choose a single finish. Better to know the envelope early and design inside it.

Roof geometry does more work than almost any other decision. It sets the massing you see from the street, the volume you feel inside, where water goes, how much attic you have and what your framing costs. A complicated roof photographs beautifully and introduces valleys, which are where roofs leak. I’m not against complexity, but every plane should be there for a reason you can name. The simplest roof that gives you the rooms you want is almost always the one that ages best.

You'll get the bad news early, when it's still cheap to deal with.

That’s the standard, and it doesn’t move depending on the size of the job.

If something goes wrong, you hear it from me first, and you hear the plan to fix it in the same conversation.

Energy performance is mostly decided in the walls, not the equipment. Insulation that’s actually installed to its rated value rather than stuffed around wiring, an air barrier that’s continuous instead of theoretical, windows specified for the elevation they sit on, and ductwork inside conditioned space where it belongs. I run thermal scans on my jobs because a camera finds a gap that a walk-through never will. A house built tight and ventilated correctly is quieter, more comfortable in August, and cheaper to run for as long as it stands.

Site work is the single most underestimated line in a custom build. Clearing, cut and fill, the driveway, drainage structures, the septic field if you’re on one, and the utility runs from wherever the service actually is to wherever your house will be. On an easy lot it’s modest. On a hard one it can rival the cost of framing the entire house. I put real numbers on it before you’re committed, because discovering it later is the most common way a budget comes apart in the first ninety days.

Utility service is the item people never price. If the meter is at the road and the house sits two hundred feet back, that trench costs real money, and it has to be coordinated with the drive and the drainage so nothing gets dug twice. On acreage you may be looking at a well, a septic field and a longer electrical run than the house itself needs.