Areas We Serve
Much of the Heights sits inside a protected historic district, where a change to the outside of the house is reviewed before a building permit is ever issued. Which side of that line you fall on shapes the whole project.
The Heights was platted in the 1890s, and most of what is still standing went up before 1940 — pier-and-beam bungalows and cottages with high ceilings, narrow rooms, and porches that face the street. They have a character nothing built since has managed to imitate. They also have a century of settling, retrofitted wiring, and additions of wildly varying quality behind them.
So the work here is almost always the same shape: keep what makes the house worth owning, and quietly rebuild everything behind it.
Large parts of the Heights fall inside City of Houston historic districts. Inside those boundaries, work that changes the exterior — an addition, a new porch, replacement windows, sometimes the siding itself — needs a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Houston Archaeological and Historical Commission before the building permit can move.
It is a separate review, on its own calendar, judged against its own standards for what reads as appropriate to the street. We check the boundary before anything else, because a design drawn without it is a design that may have to be drawn twice.
A hundred-year-old Heights house has usually been worked on by five or six people, and not all of them were careful. Knob-and-tube left live in a wall. A bathroom added over a joist somebody cut through. Piers that settled and were shimmed instead of repaired.
We open the walls early and price what is actually there. The alternative is a change order in month two, which is how a Heights renovation turns into an argument. Budgeting for the unknown at the start costs less than discovering it late.
What We Do Here
Rear and second-story additions on bungalows, drawn to what the historic district will actually approve.
Keeping the street-facing character intact while the structure, systems, and floor plan behind it get rebuilt.
Opening small original kitchens into the back of the house, including the framing work that takes.
Adding a real primary bath to a house that was built with one bathroom — or none.
New builds on Heights lots, designed to sit correctly beside the houses already on the block.
Recent projects across the Heights, Montrose, Bellaire, and the rest of the inner loop.
Also servingBellaireWest UniversityMemorialMontrose
How It Works
01
We confirm whether your property sits inside a historic district and what that means for the design — before drawings, so the plan we price is the plan that gets approved.
02
A written scope, a line-item estimate, and a realistic schedule. Matt is on site rather than behind a desk, with the same small group of vetted subs on every job.
03
Through the city's inspections and into a final walkthrough — punch list closed out before we call it finished.
Houston Heights · Veteran-Owned · Est. 2020