Design & build remodelers · Woodside, Queens
Kitchen and bath remodeling, whole-home and co-op renovation, brownstone restoration and office fit-out across western Queens since 1998. A measured survey, drawings you own, one fixed price before demolition day, our own carpenters rather than subcontractors, and twelve design and furniture houses — several of them fashion ateliers — specified and installed by us.
Why customers stay
There is no shortage of people in Queens who will fit a kitchen. These are the four reasons clients give when we ask them why they came back for the second room.
You get measured drawings, elevations, a finish schedule and one number before demolition day — not an allowance-riddled estimate that discovers a second budget halfway through. The drawings are yours whether or not you build with us.
The people in your apartment are employees who have worked together for years. The same foreman is there on day one and on handover day, and you have his number rather than a dispatcher's.
Our studio on Skillman Avenue holds real stone, veneer, tile and cloth you can carry to the window. We specify and install for twelve design and furniture houses, several of them fashion houses with interiors divisions, so the kitchen and the furniture in it can finally be decided in one conversation.
We file the permits, we prepare the co-op or condo alteration package, we carry the insurance the building demands, and the workmanship warranty is a document handed to you at the end — not a sentence said to you at the beginning.
What we do
Everything below is designed and built by people on our own payroll, under our own foreman. Nothing important is handed to a subcontractor and nobody here is paid a commission on what you choose.
Kitchen & Bath
A measured design, a fixed price and one firm doing the drawings, the approvals, the cabinetry and the stone.
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Kitchen & Bath
Waterproofing done properly, stone set flat, and a small room made to feel considerably larger than it is.
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Whole-Home Renovation
A whole house taken from survey and approvals to the day you move back in, on one contract and one schedule.
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Whole-Home Renovation
Co-op and condo renovations built around an alteration agreement, a building engineer and a board that meets when it meets.
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Office & Commercial
Workplaces rebuilt around a lease date and a landlord's rules, phased so a business can keep trading through it.
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Design, Furniture & Finishes
Twelve cabinetry, furniture and lighting houses — several of them fashion ateliers — specified, sourced and installed by us.
Read moreThe partner houses
Not for want of taste — for want of coordination. The kitchen is designed by one firm, built by a second, and furnished eight months later from a showroom that has never seen the room. You end up with beautiful things that do not quite belong to each other, bought in a hurry because the sofa had to arrive before the housewarming.
We hold trade accounts with twelve cabinetry, upholstery, surface, lighting and hardware houses across Milan, Paris, Copenhagen, Antwerp, London, Kyoto, Venice, Florence and Brooklyn. Several are the interiors divisions of fashion and couture ateliers — the same cloth, the same colour discipline, applied to rooms instead of collections. We specify the room and the things in it at the same time, and we install both.
How it works
Seven steps, and you know the fixed price before anything is demolished.
Not a call centre and not a salesperson. Tell us the room, the building and roughly what you are hoping to spend. If your budget and your ambition are not in the same place we will say so on that first call rather than after a survey.
Someone measures the space properly and finds out where the risers, the vents and the load actually are. In an older Queens building this is the difference between a design that can be built and one that gets redrawn in week three.
Plans, elevations, a finish schedule and a fixed price with a trade-by-trade breakdown. It says what happens if we open a wall and find something — because in a building from the twenties, we will.
Rajan prepares the filing or the alteration package and deals with the building engineer. We plan the schedule backwards from when your board actually meets, not from when we would like it to.
Dust barriers, filtration, floor protection, covered common parts and a crew who know a building's rules. A weekly written note with photographs, so you always know what happened this week and what happens next.
Everything from the partner houses is delivered to our store, inspected and held there — then installed in the last week. Nothing is left in your hallway in a box for a month.
A walk-through where you make the list rather than us. Then the list gets fixed, and you get the warranty, the full drawing set, the finish schedule and the furniture schedule as documents.
Woodside, and the blocks around it
Our studio and material library are on Skillman Avenue, we have been here since 1998, and most of our work is within a couple of miles of it. That is not a marketing line — it is why you can come and hold the stone before you choose it, and why we are still the people you call for the second bathroom five years later.
We are a licensed home improvement contractor, we carry general liability and workers' compensation, and a certificate of insurance naming your building, board or managing agent goes out the same day it is asked for. Where the work needs a permit, an alteration agreement or a landmark review, we file for it and see it through to sign-off rather than leaving an unpermitted renovation to surface at the closing table years later.
Who we work for
The bulk of what we do. A board that meets monthly, an alteration agreement with teeth, a building engineer to satisfy, elevator bookings, and neighbours on all six sides. We have filed enough of these packages to know which paragraph your building will argue about.
The attached and semi-attached brick houses of Woodside, Sunnyside and Maspeth. Load-bearing party walls, a rear extension everyone wants, a cellar that floods once a decade, and a stair that has to stay exactly where it is.
Plaster cornices, original parquet, marble mantels and joinery that was made by hand before anyone alive was born. We repair and match rather than strip and replace, and we know when a landmark review is genuinely required.
Fit-outs sized around a lease date and a landlord's building rules. Most of the noisy work happens before nine or after six, and we deliver in phases so a floor can keep trading while the next one is built.
In their words
They told us our first idea would not fit
We arrived with a picture of an island we had saved for two years. Inés measured it, drew it, and showed us we would lose the dishwasher door and a walkway. Then she drew something better. Nobody else we spoke to was willing to risk the sale by being right.
The alteration package went through first time
Our board has rejected packages for less. Rajan had the drawings, the insurance certificates and the licences in the format our managing agent wanted before we even asked what was needed. It was approved at the first meeting it went to.
Ninety-year-old plaster, matched
The cornice in the front room was missing about four feet where a wall had been taken out in the sixties. They cast the missing section from the original profile rather than boxing it in. You genuinely cannot see the join.
The furniture did not arrive in our hallway
The thing that ruined our last renovation was six boxes living in the corridor for five weeks. This time everything went to their store, got checked, and turned up in one day at the end, already assembled and placed.
We kept trading through the whole fit-out
They built the back half of the shop behind a dust wall while we sold from the front, then swapped over. We lost no trading days at all in a six-week programme.
Recent work
Questions
For a typical Woodside apartment or row-house kitchen, a full remodel usually lands between $45,000 and $95,000, and a bathroom between $28,000 and $55,000, depending on the size of the room, whether plumbing and walls move, and how far up the cabinetry and stone you go. Our pricing page sets out the real ranges room by room and explains the four decisions that genuinely move the number.
A kitchen or bathroom is typically eight to fourteen weeks on site once approvals are in hand; a whole apartment is four to seven months. The part people underestimate is not construction, it is approvals and lead times — which is why our schedule starts there. The project timeline page breaks all four phases down.
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. Rajan prepares the alteration agreement package — drawings, insurance certificates, contractor licences, schedule — in the format your managing agent and building engineer expect, and deals with their queries directly. Boards that meet quarterly are the single most common reason a start date slips.
Often, yes. Like-for-like replacement with nothing moving frequently does not; moving plumbing or gas, altering walls, changing a layout, or work in certain building classes does. We assess it during the design study and tell you which category you are in before you sign anything, rather than discovering it in week two.
Sometimes, and we will be honest about when it is a bad idea. A bathroom in a two-bathroom apartment, or a kitchen where a temporary one can be set up, is usually liveable. A whole-home renovation with the floors coming up rarely is. Dust barriers and filtration make it possible; they do not make it pleasant.
They are the twelve cabinetry, furniture, surface and lighting houses we specify and install most often — several of them the interiors divisions of fashion and design houses. You are not obliged to use any of them. They exist so that the kitchen and the furniture that goes in it can be decided in one conversation, with trade pricing passed through and our margin stated openly.
Free survey, written quote, fixed price
Tell us the room, the building and roughly what you are hoping to spend, and we will tell you honestly whether those three things are in the same place. The survey and the written quote are free, and the Design Study fee is credited in full against a build contract.