A building company
with a shop.
Founded in 1996. Twenty-two people, four or five houses a year, and a joinery shop in Stevenson where most of the work actually happens.
The firm
Revival Building Co. began in a rented bay behind a feed store, with one table saw and a commission to rebuild a porch that three other builders had turned down. That is still roughly the business: the houses that need someone to actually know how they were put together.
We are unusual for a builder of this size in that we keep four trades in house — timber framing, masonry, joinery and plaster. That is expensive. It is also the only way we know to control the things that decide whether a house is any good: the joint, the mortar, the profile of a moulding, and how a wall handles water over fifty years.
Everything else — mechanical, electrical, roofing, landscape — we subcontract, to the same handful of firms we have used for two decades. They know how we detail, and they know we will open a wall back up if something is not right.
Where we work
Maryland, principally Baltimore County and the Eastern Shore, with occasional work in northern Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. We do not travel further than our crew can drive home at night, because a crew living in hotels builds differently from a crew that sleeps at home.
“I have never once regretted taking longer. I have regretted going faster about a dozen times, and every one of them is still standing.”
Peter Renda · Founder
What we hold to
Four rules, and we do lose work over them.
Repairability
Every material we choose can be repaired by hand in a hundred years. That rules out a great deal of what the industry now considers normal, and it is the single most useful filter we have.
One house at a time, per crew
A crew that is on four sites is on none of them. Ours stays on one house from the excavation to the snagging list, which is also how anyone learns anything.
Say the number honestly
We would rather lose the work at the first meeting than discover the budget in month nine. Our first cost letter is deliberately uncomfortable and rarely moves.
Show the failures
Every project page on this site includes what went wrong. A builder who has never had a problem has never been asked a hard question.
The people
Twenty-two people. Six carpenters, four masons, three joiners, two plasterers, two project managers, a draughtsman, a shop foreman, an office of two, and a founder who is on site more than he is supposed to be.
We run two apprenticeships at any one time, four years each, paid from the first day. Both of our current joiners came through it. There is no other supply of people who can do this work — the trade schools stopped teaching most of it thirty years ago — so we teach it ourselves or it goes.
Every house begins with a long conversation.
We take on a small number of projects each year, and we would rather talk early — before the drawings harden — than late. Tell us where you are and what you are hoping to make.