Author: Conrado Construction Team

Part II – Building a dream from the ground up.

In Part I, The Art of Luxury Home Construction: From Concept to Realization, we covered the essential attributes you need to make your dream home a reality…patience, engagement, and teamwork.

In Part II, we’ll focus on the key elements to consider when building your home.

The Location

The location of your home will be a critical factor in determining what is and is not feasible. It might be a hilltop location with acreage and an opportunity for panoramic views, or an elegant home on a single acre lot in a well-established neighborhood.

You will have to review local and municipal zoning regulations regarding size and height, drainage, and fire codes. The permitting process in California can be daunting and time-consuming. Your General Contractor and architect should be familiar with the nuances of the process and be able to help you navigate it.

Our expertise allows us to identify potential risks, raise concerns during pre-construction, and effectively problem-solve the issues that arise.

Many of our clients start by finding a property they like and ask us our opinion.

The Style

Is your dream home a Mission Revival, a Spanish Colonial, or a cliffside Contemporary? If you can dream it, we can build it.

Your architect is the expert in translating your vision into a buildable design. What’s important is that the architectural style is executed in a way that meets your expectations as well as the municipal building codes.

In some cases, you may want to incorporate community design guidelines. For example, in the city of Saratoga, their guidelines suggest that modernization of the city’s aging housing be done in a manner that recognizes and respects the unique features and characteristics of each neighborhood.

This may influence many aspects of the home design, including its mass, height, scale, and proportions.

Its Livability

It’s easy to fall in love with a particular home design but it’s important to consider how that design translates into your day-to-day living experience. If you focus exclusively on luxury and uniqueness, you may end up compromising comfort and livability. When considering floor plans, try to visualize your family going through their daily routines.

When you work with an experienced builder like us, we help point out the tradeoffs of different floor plans and adjustments.

Open floor plans are very attractive, but what about privacy? Do you entertain a lot? How well does the home accommodate your guests? Do you have live in staff or an au pair?

These are the questions to consider when designing your home.

The Materials

Whether you’re choosing wood, stone, tile, or fabric…each material can make a statement in your home. Some clients will spare no cost for exceptional marble, rare hardwoods, or intricate mosaic tiles. While others want their choices to reflect their respect for the environment through recycled and sustainable materials.

If you need advice, we’re happy to present options and discuss the pros and cons.

No matter what kind of statement you want to make, your luxury home should be made with materials that are durable, reduce the cumulative cost of energy and ultimately enhance your standard of living.

The Technology

In the heart of Silicon Valley there is no shortage of innovation in security systems and in-home automation. At the push of a button, or simply through voice command, it’s possible to control lighting, temperature, shades, appliances, and entertainment systems.

Clients can opt for strategically placed cameras, which provide round-the-clock security, while viewing remotely from their smartphones.

Those who want to integrate green technology have options for solar-panel walls and roofs, geothermal energy, rainwater catchment and irrigation.

We also have clients who want nothing to do with technology.

It’s all a matter of preference.

With patience, engagement, and teamwork, we can make dreams come true.

For over 35 years, Conrado Home Builders has built, remodeled, and maintained extraordinary homes in Silicon Valley and on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Our honest and direct, teamwork approach has created enduring relationships with our clients that stand the test of time – just like the homes we build. Every relationship matters to every member of our team. We constantly ask questions of our clients and keep them informed throughout the process. We respect their concerns, budgets, and time, whether we are building a brand-new home or remodeling an existing one.

If you want a home set apart from all the others, while having fun creating it, we’d love to hear from you! Contact Conrado Home Builders today!

Part I – What You Need To Bring To The Table

For over 35 years we’ve masterfully built high-end homes to fulfill our client’s dreams.

Although the process is very intimate, we cultivate trust with our clients, nurturing their hopes and respecting their values as they make decisions that will impact their lives.

It’s also a process of self-discovery for our clients as the initial vision for the home gets shaped by their evolving life situations and the decisions they make during the build.

Setting Expectations At The Outset Is Key

It is important to set expectations for our clients, with the understanding that the vision they have at the start of their journey will evolve over the course of this multi-year project.

If you’re thinking about building your dream home, you need to understand that in addition to the design, engineering, and craftsmanship you need from your General Contractor, there are critical attributes that you should bring to the table for the project to come to fruition.

The First Is Patience

We tell our clients up front that this is a long process. From initial meetings to handing over the keys, depending on the size and complexity, it can easily take two years or more to complete. During that time, thousands of decisions will be made, and our clients need to be involved and available.

Even if they hire the best design team – client input is important in decision making because of the impact on timing and budget.

The Second Is Engagement

Clients who have never built a home before are always stunned by the number of choices and decisions that must be made to build their home.

If you just take the simple example of an interior door. Is it hinged, pocket or pivot? What is the door design? Contemporary or traditional? Panels or slab front? Glass or solid? Is it paint grade? Is it stain grade? What species of wood? Are the hinges concealed or exposed? What type of hardware? Does it lock? Mortise or bored? Are there electronic controls? Etc.

Now think of all the elements of a home…flooring, cabinetry, finishes and trim, roofing, gutters, exterior windows, façade materials, lighting fixtures, bathroom fixtures, appliances, etc.…each with a myriad of options, styles, and materials to choose from. There is no right or wrong answer, it’s all preferences.

Our best clients are actively engaged in the process, making decisions in a timely manner to keep the project on schedule.

The Third Is Teamwork

This is a collaborative process. Everyone involved will be working closely together.

If a client comes to us and wants our input on how to build their team, we start with the architect.

Choosing an experienced architect in your local area is paramount. They are familiar with local zoning and building codes and the approval process. Selecting a team that isn’t familiar with your area may present challenges because every municipality has some nuanced rules and regulations that can hamper or delay the permit process.

Finally, you need to like and respect them. Are they team players? Do they have a client-first, whatever-it-takes attitude to see the job through?

We believe it’s important for the entire design team to stay engaged throughout the process. Sometimes, clients think that the architect’s job is finished when the plans are complete, and a building permit is issued. In our experience, the best projects are the ones where the team stays engaged, attends weekly meetings, and advises the client on critical decisions until the very end.

As builders, we know how important teamwork is and pride ourselves on having a deep roster of subcontractors and specialists that we have worked with over the years.

We see our role on the team as experts in construction, and trusted advisors when choices must be made.

 

Once You Build The Team, It’s Time To Shape The Dream

It’s not uncommon when people come to us, they have a vision for what they want in their dream home. But there are a lot of unknown, unknowns. Over the course of building the home, the dream evolves because clients start thinking about what really matters in their life now, as well what their lives might be like in 10 -20 years.

No one foresaw a global pandemic and how dramatically it would change the way people work. As remote work became more and more the norm, there was a new demand for more elaborate home offices.

The rise in Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) as living quarters for aging parents, adult children, or guest quarters is a new phenomenon, and may be a great option now that California has enacted laws to facilitate their construction.

Events like wildfires and floods and severe storms are raising clients’ awareness of sustainable building and protecting the home and the property from extreme climates. Earlier we referred to the process as a journey of self-discovery. We facilitate that journey by asking questions about your motivations. What is important to you?

What we find is that these conversations all reach their decision point when we present budgets. Once a budget is presented a client’s decisions are typically prioritized by their “must haves”.

Are We A Good Fit?

Building a high-end luxury home is a major undertaking for all parties. We need to be selective when we look at taking on a project.

Our best clients align with our values of patience, engagement, and teamwork.

You bring those values to the table and Conrado Home Builders will help you realize your vision and build an extraordinary home. Contact us today to learn more!

Stay Tuned For Part II – Building A Dream From The Ground Up

 

The moment he saw the real estate listing, Charlie Nguyen was intrigued by the singular estate in Los Gatos — home to Kotani-En, a century-old Japanese garden that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He also knew right away that the bridge near the entrance, which provided access to the property over a creek, needed to be replaced. (Nguyen gestures to a pile of rotted wood from the old bridge to emphasize this notion.)

Once his offer on the place was accepted, he hired a contractor to rebuild the bridge in 2018. “The guy said, ‘No problem — I can do this for you,’” Nguyen recalls. “I know nothing about construction and thought it was a simple thing.”

By early 2022, however, the project had come to a standstill. “It was going nowhere,” he continues. “So I called Paul and asked, ‘Can you help me out?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we can take care of it.’ And he brought in the right people to do it.”

The Paul that Nguyen is referring to is Paul Conrado, founder of Conrado Home Builders, which had been enlisted to renovate the 1940s house at the site. By this time, a Japanese carpenter had spent eight months restoring the shrine and teahouse on the grounds; remarkably, both structures are made with only joinery and no nails.

Although Conrado Home Builders had never tackled a bridge before, Paul was eager to assist. “I started putting the pieces together to get his bridge designed and built,” he says. Among his earliest tasks was lining up a structural engineer; soil and civil engineers were already attached to the project.

Paul’s own background as a civil engineer proved invaluable. It was his idea to limit the bridge to traffic in one direction, which was key because there is no room for vehicles to pass one another nor for a fire truck turnaround. He was also instrumental in the design approval, as the structural engineer initially wanted 18-foot-deep hand-dug piers, which would have meant “a person is in a hole, putting dirt in a bucket and you’re lifting it out,” explains Colleen Conrado Ferguson, the firm’s president. Conrado deemed that proposed process too dangerous and too costly, and the structural engineer ultimately concurred.

The overriding thing is perseverance. ‘Find a way’ is one of the tenets that we run this business by.

The solution: New piers were added to the existing ones. If the latter were removed, “basically, the walls of the creek would collapse,” Colleen notes. Since there are no existing plans available to confirm the depth of the old piers, the company employed “a special technique using sound waves to determine how deep the existing piers are,” Paul says. “We’d never done that before.”

Indeed, the project entailed quite a few firsts. The effort to execute a safe structure that met current codes involved several agencies. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mandated that work could only be completed between April 15 and October 15, with a wildlife survey conducted beforehand. Meanwhile, state fire regulations required that the new bridge could accommodate a 75,000-pound fire truck.

In May 2023, the County of Santa Clara issued a permit for the steel and concrete bridge. During the construction phase of the bridge, there were logistical challenges to contend with as well. Case in point: The subcontractors, such as the concrete and steel companies, performed test runs with their trucks to ensure that they could navigate the narrow and winding road leading to the bridge.

The bridge is a testament to “how complicated small things can be,” Colleen says. “It took the most experienced people in the room to solve the problems.” Even with all of its complexities and unprecedented challenges, giving up was never an option. According to Colleen, “the overriding thing here — for us and for Charlie — is perseverance. ‘Find a way’ is one of the tenets that we run this business by. We made a commitment to help him get his bridge built and we found a way.”