Reimagined Construction
Design-build renovation
Service areas
A project manager who can be at your house before lunch is worth more to you than a firm that covers the whole metro. Most of our work sits inside the Loop.
Renovation goes wrong in the gaps — the morning a delivery is wrong, the afternoon an inspector arrives early, the day a trade finds something nobody expected. All of those are cheap to fix if someone can be there in twenty minutes and expensive if they cannot.
So we cover a small area properly rather than a large one thinly. It also means we know the permit officers, the historic district reviewers and the soil, which shortens every one of those conversations.
Inside the Loop the stock is mostly pre-war bungalows and Craftsman cottages, 1940s to 60s ranches, and the townhouses that replaced a good number of both in the 1990s. Each has its own failure mode.
Bungalows are pier-and-beam, which makes services easy to reach and foundations easy to neglect. Ranches are slab-on-grade, which makes movement the first question and drainage relocation the expensive one. Nineties townhouses are usually structurally fine and mechanically undersized.
Houston sits on expansive clay. It swells when wet and shrinks when dry, and over a Gulf Coast year it does both hard. Every foundation in this city is moving; the question is only how much and whether it has stopped.
That is why we assess foundations in discovery rather than at contract, and why a second-storey addition is a foundation project before it is an architectural one.
Houston famously has no zoning, which regularly convinces people there are no constraints on what they can build. There are — they are just enforced differently.
Deed restrictions run with the property and are enforced by neighbours and civic associations. Platting, setbacks and height limits apply on top. And in a historic district, anything visible from the street goes through design review.
Deed restrictions — checked in discovery, before design starts.
Historic district review — Heights, Norhill, Woodland Heights and others.
City of Houston permitting and inspections — we file and manage all of it.
Wind-driven rain, long humid summers and the occasional named storm decide a lot about detailing here. Roof-to-wall junctions on additions, flashing, and how fast a frame gets dried in are not finishing details in this city — they are the difference between a sound addition and a leak you chase for years.
It also shapes the schedule. We sequence second-storey work to dry in fast rather than efficiently, because the cost of that choice is small and the cost of the alternative is not.
Named, with the thing that actually changes the job in each. If your street is not here, ask — the boundary is a radius, not a list.
Houston Heights
Historic district review on anything visible from the street. Pier-and-beam bungalows, mostly 1900–1930, with rear additions of wildly varying quality.
West University
Tight lots and strict setbacks. Largely 1940s stock, much of it already renovated once — which means the interesting findings are usually somebody else's work.
Bellaire
Slab-on-grade ranches and a lot of second-storey additions. Foundation assessment is the first conversation, not the last.
River Oaks
Larger footprints, longer programmes, and deed restrictions with real teeth. Design review is normal rather than exceptional.
Montrose
The most mixed stock we work in — bungalows next to 1960s apartments next to new townhouses. Every job starts with finding out what was actually built.
Garden Oaks and Oak Forest
Post-war ranches on generous lots. Additions are usually possible and usually worth doing; drainage is the recurring surprise.
Memorial
Larger lots, mature trees and floodplain considerations on parts of it. Elevation and drainage decide more here than in any other area we work.
The first step is a walkthrough and an honest range. We will tell you what the soil, the restrictions and the age of the house are likely to mean before you spend anything.