Category: Construction

 

Building a custom estate is like building a work of art. The process of building such a home requires careful planning, preparation, and organization. We at Conrado Home Builders believe that building a truly unique and exceptional custom home starts with a comprehensive, thorough, and exacting preconstruction phase. In essence, when you hire Conrado Home Builders to build your custom home estate or luxury remodeling project, you can rest assured that we will take the necessary time to learn about your vision, understand your needs and dreams for your home, share our expertise and recommendations, and do all of the indispensable preparatory work during our rigorous preconstruction phase. Before the first nail is hammered or the first construction truck shows up at the building site, we want to be 100 percent sure that we have completely built your home in our head and are prepared for any potential obstacles that may appear throughout the building process.

Though some people might fear that a prolonged preconstruction phase will add to the overall timeline of the building process, the opposite is true. Taking the time and effort to properly plan every square foot of the construction, draw up a realistic and detailed budget, source the needed materials across the increasingly complex supply lines, and create the best building team for your unique custom estate will most likely reduce the overall construction time. By properly preparing and organizing our work, we can usually avoid common hurdles, setbacks, and other “bumps in the road” inevitable in any custom home construction. Our preconstruction process fits seamlessly with the architectural design and City approval timeline and adds no additional days to the project timeline.

This short article outlines some of the delays and obstacles that can be avoided because of Conrado’s thorough and arduous focus on the preconstruction phase.

A Detailed Building Plan to Avoid Surprises in the Final Product

When a client hires Conrado Home Builders for a new custom estate or a major luxury renovation, we understand that they expect the most legendary quality on the market. Your custom estate will most likely be one of the largest single expenses you will ever make in life, and we want to ensure that your home will last for a lifetime (or two).

In order to deliver this legendary quality, we need to ensure that we completely understand your vision, hopes, and dreams for your custom home. Unfortunately, when many homeowners are handed over the keys to their new custom home, they may immediately find differences and discrepancies between what they had imagined and what the final product resembles.

We want you to be surprised at the quality of the construction, our intimate attention to even the finest details, and the unparalleled craftsmanship that characterizes Conrado’s custom homes, and we want to eliminate unexpected changes in the floor plan or design characteristics that you were not expecting.

Our preconstruction phase starts with sitting down with our clients to learn about their desires, wishes, and plans for their home. We don’t just want to know how many square feet they want and how many bedrooms and baths. Rather, we want to know if they prefer the look of Brazilian Cherry or Tigerwood for your dining room floor. We want them to understand the differences between an HRV and ERV mechanical ventilation system to decide which option will help them reduce their energy bills while ensuring the best indoor air quality. In short, we want to be 100 percent certain that every last detail of their custom home is discussed, planned for, and drawn up before construction begins.

Transparent Budgeting: Our Fiduciary Responsibility to our Clients

Secondly, Conrado Home Builder’s preconstruction planning services allow us to draw up a detailed and comprehensive budget for your home. We believe wholeheartedly that we have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients, and we want to guarantee that every last cent is meaningfully spent. Without a detailed budget, it is common for the final price tag of the custom home to drastically increase over what was first quoted. With Conrado, however, we go the extra mile to quote and source every item to reduce unexpected costs and price fluctuations.

Furthermore, during our budgeting process, we help our clients understand ways to reduce the building costs and the long-term operational costs of the home. After decades of building the most legendary custom homes in the San Francisco Bay area, our building teams have identified the best local materials and subcontractors available. By prioritizing local building materials, we can help reduce the overall cost of the home, avoid potentially lengthy delays that come with the disruption of distant supply chains, and lower the home’s embodied energy footprint.

We are proud to be the leading green builders in the region, and throughout the process of drawing up the budget, we can help you find ways to approach net-zero energy status. Our building teams have decades of combined experience in choosing the best renewable energy technologies, building the most airtight building envelopes, and implementing the most energy-efficient building strategies and materials. The end result of these green building techniques is that our clients should expect to see impressive savings in the operational energy use of their custom estate.

Unexpected Permitting Delays: Another Obstacle Avoided with Preconstruction

One of the most frustrating incidents that often occur in the building of a custom home is the unexpected and lengthy delays due to not having the correct permits in order. Building, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical permits are all required when building a new custom home. Furthermore, the hilly terrain defines much of the landscape in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley, Woodside, Atherton, and other surrounding communities; a grading permit is usually required.

If those permits have not been acquired in advance, you may be looking at lengthy delays in the overall build timeline. Here at Conrado, however, during the preconstruction phase, we obtain all necessary permits before construction begins. We don’t want to have a whole workforce on site unable to work their magic due to a missing permit or issues with building codes. To avoid these delays, we have developed solid relationships with local governments, building code inspectors, and other entities to ensure that your custom home has all the needed permits and paperwork to ensure a smooth building process.

Building the Best Construction Team to Avoid Downtime

When you hire Conrado Home Builders for your custom home construction, you will get a project manager who will be in charge of the entire team and hiring all relevant sub-contractors. That means that you will not have to worry about finding a replacement plumber at the last minute if our regular plumber calls in sick. During the preconstruction phase, Conrado will create a custom team that will work together for the duration of your custom home construction.

By having a unique full-time project manager, you can avoid delays in procuring labor and ensure the most qualified experts for your home. We know that the most capable and experienced subcontractors build the best custom homes. Instead of simply referring you to a random architect or using the cheapest subs found on Google, our team-centric approach is focused on tailoring a specialized team to help our individual clients achieve their dream homes.

Depending on the individual case, your custom home construction team might include a project coordinator, a project manager, a field operations manager, a project executive, the architect, the interior design team, lighting specialists, energy efficiency auditors, renewable energy experts, and more. Furthermore, all of our sub-contractors are rigorously evaluated and vetted to ensure that we are able to deliver legendary quality in the homes we build. Legendary quality is our hallmark, and we are committed to delivering quality custom homes that look amazing and will last a lifetime.

Procurement of the Highest Quality Building Materials to Avoid Supply Chain Backups

Lastly, a comprehensive preconstruction phase can also help to ensure that the construction doesn’t stop due to a disruption in the delivery of needed materials. The combination of a global pandemic, rising energy and transportation costs, and economic stagnation has currently led to serious shortages and delays in the procurement and delivery of different building materials.

Your project manager will develop a detailed building plan that determines when specific building materials need to be delivered to the building site. We have long-standing relationships with providers and transportation companies to avoid unexpected delays and interruptions. Furthermore, during the preconstruction phase, we create backup plans to protect against potential supply chain issues that can disrupt the building process.

Conrado is aligned with our clients in wanting to deliver the highest quality home as fast as possible. Because of this alignment, there is team synergy which leads to outstanding homes and enduring relationships.

How to Hire Conrado Home Builders

When you hire Conrado Home Builders, you know that you will be getting the absolute best building teams that can deliver the most legendary quality custom estates on the market. Even better, however, is that you will also be getting a team of builders committed to learning what exactly you desire for the custom home that will be uniquely your own.

Our preconstruction phase is designed to understand your vision, develop a plan together with you, create a transparent budget that saves money, and create a team that will deliver a legendary quality home.. Of course, by taking the time to get to know our clients, we also deeply value the ability to forge enduring relationships and friendships. We care about the homes we build, and we will always be here to help our clients with whatever issue that might come up down the road. Contact us today to find out how we can help you design and build the most legendary custom estate for you and your family in the Bay area.

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.”