Shape Homes · About

We are a builder that happens to build in components.

The design comes first. Building it in components is how we hold the price and the date, and it is the reason a home that starts as your drawing still finishes on a schedule you can plan a move around.

Shape Homes designs and builds custom homes and accessory dwelling units on lots people already own, across the nine Bay Area counties. Your walls, floors and roof are cut and assembled on jigs in a Northern California shop while a crew pours your foundation. They arrive flat on an ordinary flatbed and go up in about a week, with no crane and no road closure, and no lot is too tight to take delivery.

Everything after the shell happens on site, which is exactly why you can still move a wall in month four. We start from one of more than 200 library plans or from your own drawings, and if you have an architect they stay on the job. Every change is priced before you commit to it.

Your price is fixed at signing, the completion date is written into the agreement, and your project manager does not change part-way through the build. We tell you what your lot will take before you pay us anything.

Members of our team were directly involved in writing California's ADU legislation. We build to these rules because we helped shape them.

The team

The people who design it, price it, and put it up.

Where we work

We build across the Peninsula and the South Bay, with dedicated teams for Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Hillsborough, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Saratoga and Monte Sereno. Each one carries that town's real ordinance rules. See the full list on where we build.