We're driven by the challenge.
Steep blocks, flood plains, bushfire zones, difficult soil. Most builders steer clear of them. We think that's exactly where you find out what a builder is capable of, and it's part of why we've never built the same home twice.
The same instinct shows up long before anything is built. A lot of what we add early is raising the things nobody has thought to mention yet. How the sun tracks across the block. Where the breeze comes from. What the soil is likely to cost you. Not to complicate the decision, but so it gets made with the whole picture in front of you.
I started as an apprentice carpenter in 1997 and went on to subcontract to Sorensen and Caldon. Around 2002, John asked me into the office to help on a project. That became twelve months in Wollongong supervising twenty-five homes at once. In 2003 I received the NSW State Medal for the highest mark in Certificate IV in Building Studies. In 2005 John and I became partners, and in 2020 I took over the business. Today I’m on the NSW Master Builders Association Council of Management, President of its Manning-Great Lakes Division, and a member of the HIA Northern NSW Committee.
Nearly thirty years on, I’m still personally involved in every home we build, from the first site visit to handover. What keeps me here is the same thing that pulled me in as a teenager helping my parents with a two-storey loft addition: working out how to make a design actually work in the real world. The harder the site, the more interesting the problem.
Recognition
Our office is at 13 Cornwall St, Taree, and we build within about an hour of it: Wingham, Gloucester, Harrington, Hallidays Point, Tallwoods Village, Forster-Tuncurry, Pacific Palms, Blueys Beach, Boomerang Beach, Camden Haven, Wauchope, Sovereign Hills and Port Macquarie.
Sixty-eight years in one region buys a specific kind of knowledge. We know the Mid Coast Council DCP and LEP. We know which land floods and which sits in a bushfire zone, what the soil tends to do before the report comes back, and how quickly the coastal air finds the wrong materials. We know where the afternoon sun lands and where the breeze comes from, street by street.
Everything from the first conversation to the finished home
