Asheville, North Carolina
A small design-build studio. We draw your renovation, price it honestly, and build it with the same four people from demolition to the last coat of wax.
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What we do
Every one of them starts with drawings. We will not price a renovation we have not designed — it is how budgets stay honest.
01 — The room you actually live in
We start with how you cook, not with a catalogue. Custom cabinetry from a shop we have used for a decade, stone chosen at the slab yard with you, and lighting designed rather than sprinkled.
02 — Small rooms, careful hands
Waterproofing done properly and invisibly, tile set by one person start to finish, and storage that makes a small room feel deliberate rather than crowded.
03 — The long conversation
Rethinking how the whole house works — moving walls, adding light, correcting a hundred years of well-meant changes. Drawn, permitted and built by the studio.
How we work
Nothing here is rushed, and nothing is decided for you.
An hour at your kitchen table. What frustrates you, what you love, what you would never change.
Measured drawings, two or three schemes, and a real budget range before you commit to building.
Slab yard, tile shop, hardware. We go with you and keep the running total visible the whole time.
The same small crew, every day, in a house they treat as yours. Friday photo updates.
We come back at one month and one year to adjust doors, touch up and check the work.
Portfolio
Each of these took months. We would rather show you four properly than forty as thumbnails.
A 1921 bungalow opened to the garden. We removed the wall between kitchen and porch, rebuilt the chimney breast as a reading nook, and left every original trim profile intact.
Plaster walls, an unlovable galley, and a family who cooks every night. New window seat, quarter-sawn oak cabinetry and soapstone that will age with them.
Two cramped bedrooms became one suite with a dressing room and a bath that gets the morning light. Radiant floors, zellige tile set by hand.
A 340 square foot addition that looks original — same roof pitch, salvaged brick, and a screened porch the family now uses eight months a year.
Palette
Not a house style — a set of things that age well in this climate and this light. Yours will be different, but it will start here.
Before / after
Drag the handle. Same corner, same time of day.
The studio
You will know all of us by name within a week. Nobody is handed off to a project coordinator you have never met.
Principal & Designer
Trained as an architect, spent six years on site before opening the studio. Draws every project herself.
Build Lead
Twenty years of finish carpentry. Runs the site, sets the trim, and will not let a door hang badly.
Tile & Stone
Sets every tile on every project start to finish, which is why the lines actually line up.
Client Liaison
Keeps the schedule, the selections and the running budget where you can see them.
Investment
Real ranges from the last two years of work in Asheville, not national averages. Design fees are credited toward construction when you build with us.
Typically$65k – $140k
One kitchen, one bath, or a room reworked properly with no structural changes.
10–12 weeks
Start a conversationTypically$140k – $280k
The two rooms most people do together, with the structural work to open them up.
13–18 weeks
Start a conversationFrom$300k
Rethinking the entire plan, usually with an addition and a full mechanical replacement.
6–11 months
Start a conversationRanges include our design work, permits, labour and mid-to-high finishes. Structural surprises in a hundred-year-old house are the one thing nobody can price in advance — we carry a written contingency and show you every dollar of it.
Clients
We interviewed four builders. Nora was the only one who asked how we actually use the kitchen before telling us what it would cost. Sixteen weeks later we have a house that feels like it was always this way.
Hannah & Pete L.
Montford bungalow, whole house
They protected the original trim like it was theirs. That mattered more to me than anything else.
The running budget was visible the entire time. No envelope moments.
They came back a year later to adjust two doors nobody but Ben had noticed.
Journal
What we are learning, specifying and second-guessing. Roughly monthly.
Six years of watching it wear unevenly in wet rooms changed our minds. What we use instead, and what it costs.
Read it
Every Asheville bungalow has a sloping floor. Here is how we decide whether to level it, and when levelling makes things worse.
Read it
A plain-language walk through the drawings, the budget and the two weeks of thinking that make the build boring — in the best way.
Read itQuestions
Occasionally, but honestly not often — we take eight to ten projects a year and they tend to be full rooms or more. If yours is smaller we are glad to point you toward two builders we trust.
Between $4,500 and $12,000 depending on scope. It buys measured drawings, two or three design schemes and a real construction budget — and it is credited toward the build if you go ahead with us.
For a kitchen or a bath, usually yes, with a temporary setup and dust walls. For whole-house work most clients move out for the middle stretch. We will tell you honestly at the design stage.
Design usually starts within four to six weeks of a signed agreement. Construction starts three to five months out, and the design phase fills most of that gap.
Most of our work is pre-1940. We handle historic-district review and we know which original details are worth the extra week to save.
Every project carries a written contingency. When we open something up we photograph it, price the fix and show you the options before anyone touches it.
Where we work
We stay close so the crew is on site by eight and the studio can drop in unannounced.
Say hello
We take on eight to ten projects a year, so we start with a long conversation rather than a quick quote.