Custom home builders working in Washington, DC. Licensed in the District.

The houses of upper Northwest were built well and laid out for 1928. Solid masonry, real plaster, oak floors, rooms with proportions that newer construction rarely gets right - and a kitchen sealed off at the back of the house, one full bathroom upstairs, closets sized for a different century, and a basement you walk through with your head down. If you own a colonial, Tudor, or foursquare in Forest Hills, Cleveland Park, Chevy Chase DC, AU Park, or Spring Valley, you already know the trade: great bones, obsolete layout.

That trade is most of what we're hired to fix in the District. Sometimes the answer is a whole-home renovation that keeps the shell and rebuilds everything inside it. Sometimes it's a second-story addition that finally gives the house the bedrooms and baths it never had. Occasionally it's a ground-up custom home on a lot where the existing structure isn't worth saving - rarer in DC than in the Maryland suburbs, because the housing stock here is usually worth keeping.

Building inside the District is its own discipline. Lots are tight, neighbors are close, and staging a project means planning where the dumpster, the deliveries, and the crew parking go before the first wall opens. Permits run through DC's Department of Buildings: a separate regime from Montgomery County's, with its own applications, plan review, and inspection schedule. And in some pockets of upper Northwest, Cleveland Park among them, historic-district rules add a design review before exterior changes can move forward. None of this is a reason not to build here. It's a reason to hire a builder who has already done it here.

One more thing worth saying plainly. People searching for luxury home builders in Washington, DC are mostly not after marble for its own sake. They want a prewar house that finally works: a kitchen open to the main living space, a primary suite with a real bath, systems from this century behind the original plaster. That is the version of luxury we build in upper Northwest, and it keeps the character these houses were built with where it counts.

Five ways into a better house. Two of them fit the District best.

• Whole-home remodeling - the signature DC project: keep the masonry shell and the streetscape, rebuild the layout and the systems inside it. A new kitchen at the center of the main floor, baths where they belong, wiring and HVAC from this century.
• Home additions - a full second story that buys the room a prewar floor plan never had. On tight NW lots, the design work is mostly about zoning math: height limits, setbacks, and what review will allow.
• Custom homes - ground-up builds for the lot that justifies one. Less common in DC than in Maryland, but the process and the in-house carpentry and paint crews are the same ones behind the new homes we build in Bethesda and Kensington.
• Design-build - one firm covering both the drawings and the construction, so nothing is lost in a handoff between architect and builder. Useful anywhere; especially useful where historic review can send drawings back for another pass.
• Teardown & rebuild - the rare DC case. When the existing structure genuinely isn't worth saving and the lot allows it, we can take a project from demolition through final inspection.