ProjectCanyon House
Area3,150 sq ft
Cost$2,240,000
Per sq ft$711
Laguna Canyon — Poured against the slope it stands on. The formwork lumber became the fence.
A FICTIONAL STUDIO. A DESIGN DEMO.
Quiet houses,
honest numbers.
A design-build studio for minimalist homes on difficult Laguna lots — and the only builder page you'll find that prints what its houses cost.
Terrace House3,600 sq ft · $2,520,000 · $700/sq ft
The portfolio
Find a house — the filters actually filter.
Five houses, every card printing the three numbers this vertical hides: what it measures, what it cost, and what that is per square foot. The sixth card is honest about being yours.
ProjectGallery House
Area2,400 sq ft
Cost$1,530,000
Per sq ft$638
Arch Beach Heights — One story, one corner window, nothing else volunteered. The art gets the walls.
ProjectCedar Court
Area3,900 sq ft
Cost$2,110,000
Per sq ft$541
Top of the World — Cedar that will silver, charcoal panel that won't. The pines were the design brief.
ProjectPergola House
Area2,850 sq ft
Cost$1,760,000
Per sq ft$618
Woods Cove — Half the square footage has no glass at all — Laguna's real luxury is a room the weather visits.
ProjectThe Compound
Area3,400 sq ft
Cost$2,390,000
Per sq ft$703
Bluebird Canyon — A main house and an ADU that agree with each other, either end of a garden path.
Yours
Open the ledgersomewhere in Laguna · sq ft TBD · cost: see the ledger below
The five above are fictional. The arithmetic below is not.
The scheme
The scheme of work — with the months printed.
Five steps, like every builder page alive. The difference is the small type: each step carries its real duration, including the one the county is in charge of.
Feasibilitymonth 0–1
Before drawing anything: what the lot allows, what the view corridors protect, what the slope costs. Some lots fail here, and hearing it in month one is a service.
Designmonths 2–7
The house, drawn until the drawings stop arguing with the site. Laguna rewards restraint — the Design Review Board has opinions, and so do your neighbors' view corridors.
Design Review & permitsmonths 6–15
The Board meets twice a month. Hearings, story poles, neighbor notice, coastal review where it applies. This is the part every builder's timeline quietly omits, so ours prints it.
The buildmonths 14–34
Fourteen to twenty months of actual construction, depending on slope, access and how much of the house is poured rather than framed. Concrete is slow. That's partly the point of concrete.
Keysthe day it's done
No 'welcome home' balloon arch. A walkthrough with a punch list, the binder of everything as-built, and a house that will outlast everyone in this sentence.
The material
The material is the argument.
Board-formed concrete is poured against rough-sawn lumber, and when the forms come off, the wall keeps the grain — knots, saw marks, the seam where one board met the next. It is a material that shows exactly how it was made. We think a builder's website should work the same way, which is why every number on this page is visible and every process step has a month attached.
This paragraph is where builder sites put their filler — the reference this page was designed from literally ships with placeholder text nobody ever replaced. We would rather use the space to tell you the page is monochrome on purpose: the only colour we ship is the light a house makes at dusk.
Boardform is fictional. The mechanics on this page — the printed costs, the ledger below, the honest months — are what Isolume builds for real businesses that are tired of websites that say nothing beautifully.
The arithmetic
The build ledger — the number, before the meeting.
Pick a size, a finish, a lot. The right sheet does what every builder saves for the second meeting: the whole arithmetic, in the open, as a range — because that is the only honest shape a construction budget has.
The size
The finish
The lot
The ledger · a range, on purpose
Construction2,400 sq ft × $520–620 × 1.18 hillside$1,472,640 – $1,755,840
Design, engineering, the city14% of construction — architecture, structural, geotech, fees$206,170 – $245,818
THE RANGE$1,678,810 – $2,001,658
27–39 months, honestly: design 5–7, Design Review & permits 5–9 (the Board meets twice a month — the step every schedule omits), the build 14–20, plus 3 for the hillside.
Fictional bands, real mechanics — mid-market Orange County custom work runs roughly $400–600 a square foot and up (2026 guides), and land is not in this number. A real studio would plug in its own history; the honesty is the product either way.
Walk this range on your lotThe policy
What this page refuses to do.
Each of these is a habit of the vertical, retired on purpose.
No renders sold as photographs.
Every image on this page is a photograph of a real building. None of them are our projects, because our projects don't exist — the cards say so. A render can promise anything; a photograph had to happen.
No “starting at $299 a square foot.”
That number exists to get you on the phone, and it dies in the first meeting. Real Orange County custom work runs roughly $400–600 a square foot in the middle of the market and up from there — printed sources, printed math, no phone call required.
No timeline that skips the Board.
Design review and permits in Laguna Beach take months and everyone building here knows it. A schedule that omits step 03 isn't optimistic — it's a first invoice with a surprise in it.
No wall of awards.
A fictional studio has won nothing, so this page shows nothing — and the real version of this page would show exactly what it could prove, which is the same policy.