Building a new home in Tahoe is a permitting project before it is a framing project.
TRPA land coverage allowances, BMP requirements, and the Building Department's seasonal grading windows shape what you can build and when you can build it. A lot that looks buildable on a map may carry only a few hundred square feet of new coverage once the existing impervious surface, the stream environment zone, and the scenic thresholds are counted. We read all of that before you fall in love with a floor plan.
We run the build. The same people who walk the lot with you are the people who frame the house. We engineer for the local South Shore design conditions, not a generic mountain spec pulled off a shelf, because the ground snow load here, the fire code, and the soils are specific to this side of the basin.
Across 100+ completed homes we have learned where the surprises hide: in the geotech report, in the allowance line items, in the gap between what a homeowner pictures and what the coverage math allows. Our job is to find those early, put real numbers on them, and keep you off the surprise list once the work is underway.
Site to occupancy
Built to the owner’s timeline
Weekly owner updates
Before anything is designed, we walk the lot and run the math that decides whether it pencils. That means a TRPA coverage check against the existing impervious surface, a look at soils and drainage, and a read on setbacks, the stream environment zone, and any scenic corridor that touches the parcel. If you are still deciding between two lots, this is the phase that tells you which one will actually let you build the house you want.
Plans and engineering come together with the budget, not after it. We work alongside your architect through structural and civil engineering, size the snow load to the local design number, and submit for permit with a complete package the first time. By the end of this phase you have a fixed budget with allowances written out in plain language, so the line items are decisions you made rather than numbers we surprise you with later.
The South Shore sequence runs through both the Building Department and TRPA, and the order matters. We sit in pre-application meetings ourselves rather than sending a form and hoping. Grading windows are seasonal, so timing the approval to land before the window opens can save an entire building season. We hold the package through review, answer the agency's comments, and keep the schedule honest about what is in our hands and what is in theirs.
Framing through finish, run by the same crew start to finish: the field team you met at the site walk. Fire-resistant assemblies, hardened decks, and ember-resistant vents are built in at framing rather than added on at the end. We send weekly owner updates, so you know what happened on site that week and what is coming next, whether you live down the road or across the country.
We walk the punch list with you, close out the inspections, and hand over a home with the certificate of occupancy in hand. The relationship does not end at the keys. We'll come back for a walkthrough after the first full Tahoe winter to catch anything that settled, because a house that has been through one season tells you more than one that has not.
Most of our work sits on the South Shore and the East Shore of the lake. In the Tahoe Keys we build on the waterfront and the interior lagoons, where lot coverage is tight and the water table is high, so foundation design earns its keep. Up the grade from the lake the parcels are larger and the snow load conversation gets more serious the moment you leave the lake level. Stateline and Zephyr Cove put us across the Nevada line, where the permitting agencies and design review run their own playbook.
That range is the reason the dual license matters. We hold CA #775228 and NV #77135, which means one builder, one crew, and one budget can carry a project whether your lot is in California or Nevada. You are not handing off to a second contractor at the state line, and you are not learning two sets of names halfway through the job. The team that starts the house finishes it, wherever in the basin it stands.
We are happy to tell you what we have learned about a given neighborhood before you buy. Coverage, access, and snow shed behave differently in the Keys than they do up the grade, and a short conversation about a specific parcel is usually worth more than any general advice about the basin.
Interior · South ShoreNew homes across Tahoe Keys, Zephyr Cove, Stateline, and the South Shore.
View all homesHe built our house as if it was his own.
The other two ways we build
