Custom Home Builder in Los Angeles & Altadena Fire Rebuild

Fire rebuilds in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, and new custom homes across Los Angeles County. On every project, we handle the full scope — design, engineering, permits, and construction — under one contract.

Yes. Our office is in Altadena, and we have active rebuilds in Altadena, Pasadena, and Pacific Palisades. The two markets aren’t the same process — Altadena is unincorporated Los Angeles County, and Pacific Palisades is in the City of Los Angeles under LADBS, which runs a self-certification program and targets 30 business days from a complete application.

Yes, and we’d rather you did. We’ll put you in touch with homeowners we’ve built for — people whose houses are finished and who have been living in them. Not just the reviews page. Actual phone numbers, and you can ask them anything you want, including what went wrong on their project and how we handled it. We’ll also walk you through an active site. Fire rebuilds in progress and custom homes under construction. You’ll see framing, fire-rated assemblies going in, how the crew works, how clean the site is. A finished house photographs well no matter who built it — a job in the middle is harder to fake. If a contractor won’t do either of those, that tells you something.

One. We’re a design-build firm, so the drawings, the engineering, and the construction all come from the same team under a single contract.

The practical difference shows up when something needs solving. There’s no gap to fall into between the firm that drew it and the firm building it, no waiting while two companies work out whose problem it is, and nobody to point at.

You get access to a client portal from day one. Schedule, selections, budget, change orders, photos, and a daily log from the site — in one place, updated as things happen rather than when someone remembers to send an email. The daily log is the part clients use most. It’s a record of what happened on your house that day: who was on site, what got done, what’s next, and photos. You can see yesterday without calling anyone. We run it on Buildertrend. You get a login, not a monthly PDF. And you still have our numbers. The portal replaces chasing people for a status update, not the people. Through the phases where decisions come fast — selections, framing, inspections — we over-communicate on purpose.

We do. Permits aren’t handed back to you. We prepare the submittal, respond to corrections, and coordinate the departmental reviews.

In our experience it runs about four to seven months from a cleared lot to a permit in hand. Two to three months of that is design and drawings, and one to three months is plan check. The largest variable isn’t the corrections themselves — it’s how long the review takes after you resubmit, which is why we hold submittals to two correction rounds.

Every contract we write is fixed price. And you get that price before the plans are finalized, not after. The order matters. The usual sequence is design first and price at the end — which is how a homeowner spends four months designing a house and then learns it’s well past what they have. We give you a number early, then stay in the design process to hold it. When a selection or a change starts to move the budget, you hear about it while it’s still a drawing. So the fixed price you sign isn’t a guess we’re hoping holds. It’s a number we’ve been managing toward the entire time. It changes if you change the scope, or in the rare case something turns up that nobody could have seen. Either way you get it in writing, with the cost, before any work happens.

We cap our active project load at fifteen. It costs us work, and we’ve kept it anyway. The thing clients actually hire us for is being able to reach someone in month fourteen, and that stops being true past a certain number of jobs.

Our office is inside the Eaton Fire footprint and most of our active rebuilds are within a few miles of it. We work as one team under one contract rather than handing you off between firms. We price before the drawings are final so the budget stays real. And we cap how much work we take so the service holds up through the end of a build, not just the beginning.

Tell us where your lot is and what stage you’re at. The first conversation is free, and if you only want to know what the code now requires and what your timeline realistically looks like, we’ll tell you that whether or not you hire us.