Luxury Remodeling in La Verne

La Verne began in 1887 as Lordsburg, a railroad townsite that Isaac W. Lord platted with the Santa Fe's land company, and residents voted in the La Verne name only after Lord's death in 1917. Victorian cottages and Craftsman bungalows still gather along Third Street in the old grid, a reminder of the navel orange town that lasted until the 1950s traded its citrus acreage for housing tracts. North of the valley floor the city climbs into what its code calls the rugged hillsides of north La Verne, where a hillside overlay shapes grading, walls, fire-resistant construction and the fate of native oaks. Those layers give projects here very different starting points: a Lordsburg bungalow follows heritage preservation guidelines, a foothill parcel follows the overlay, and every foundation in town begins from the building code's assumption of expansive soil. The first questions for any pool, garden or ADU are which specific plan or overlay covers the lot and how steeply the ground falls away.

The Lordsburg townsite, platted in 1887 and 1888, keeps much of its grid of lettered and numbered streets, with alleys behind the older blocks, block after block of bungalows built between 1900 and 1930, and original residential lots of 50 by 140 feet around the core; post-war tracts on its east side traded the grid for cul-de-sacs. In Lordsburg, remodels and expansions that strictly follow the specific plan's preservation standards may reach a 0.45 floor area ratio, and one-story homes up to 45 percent lot coverage, against the 35 percent that La Verne's residential districts otherwise allow. In the hillside areas, development is limited to flat or gently sloping ground, and fill may not exceed an average depth of five feet, nor cuts an average height of eight feet, within any building pad, lot or slope.

One team designs, permits and builds every project, and our own crews self-perform the work, so the people who plan your La Verne project are the people on site building it.