Aurelio framed other people’s houses for eight years first.
He came from Ponce in 1971 with a set of tools and no English, worked for other builders until 1979, and then put his own name on a company. That decision is the reason there is a bronze plate beside two hundred and fourteen front doors in this county.
- Aurelio Castellano
FounderRetired in 2016. Still at every slab pour.
Eight years framing for other people taught him what he did not want to do, and in 1979 he stopped doing it. He handed the company to Miguel in 2016 and has been at every single slab pour since, which nobody asked him to do and nobody is going to stop. He does not carry a phone on site.
- Miguel Castellano
PresidentHolds the licence the company builds under.
Florida certified general contractor. He runs the estimating himself rather than handing it to somebody with a spreadsheet, which is why the numbers on sheet 03 are printed rather than hidden, and he reads every enquiry that comes through this site. He is on each of the four or five active sites at least twice a week.
- Sofia Castellano
Design and selectionsRuns the part that actually goes wrong.
Selections is where custom builds fail: eleven months of decisions, each one small, each one with a lead time and a price attached. Sofia holds that entire schedule, meets you roughly every three weeks through design, and tells you no when a choice will not arrive in time. It is the least glamorous job in the company and the one that protects the date.
Two hundred and fourteen plates. We know where all of them are.
The first one went up in 1981 because a client asked for it. Aurelio kept doing it, and at some point it stopped being a gesture and started being the reason the company is the size it is.
Here is the arithmetic of a plate. If your name is cut into metal beside a front door, you cannot build a house you would not want to drive past. You cannot hand a family a house with a list of things to come back for. You cannot grow to thirty houses a year, because you would stop knowing which ones they were.
So the number is small on purpose. Four to six a year, two hundred and fourteen since 1979, and Miguel can tell you the street of every one of them. That is not a marketing line, it is the constraint the whole company is built around, and it is the only promise on this website that is impossible to fake.
Why the company is not called something else.
Aurelio was advised in 1979 to pick a name that sounded established. Something with Estates or Custom Homes in it. He used his own instead, on the grounds that it was the only name he could not walk away from.
Every argument on this site comes back to that. The published costs on sheet 03, the on time record on sheet 04 with the three misses named, the specification on sheet 07, the four to six houses a year. None of it is generosity. It is what a company does when its name is screwed to the wall of every house it has ever built.
Three questions about the company.
Who will I actually be dealing with, day to day?
Three people, and you will have all three numbers. Miguel for the contract, the money and anything structural. Sofia for every selection, from the front door to the cabinet hardware, on a schedule she sets and holds. And the superintendent running your house, who is on site daily and runs three houses at most. There is no client portal here that somebody else answers, and there is no account manager standing between you and the person who knows.
What happens to the company when Miguel retires?
It is a fair question to ask a family business and most of them dodge it. The honest answer is that there is no plan to sell to anybody, because the value of this company is the name on the plate and that does not transfer. Sofia’s eldest is doing a construction management degree and may want it. If neither of them takes it, the company finishes its last house and stops, which is a better ending than the name ending up on somebody else’s marketing.
Do you build outside Orlando?
Orange, Seminole and Lake counties, and in practice within about forty minutes of the office. That is not a franchise boundary, it is how far the superintendent can drive twice in a day and how far the trades will follow us. We have turned down two houses on the coast and one in Ocala for exactly that reason. A builder who is two hours away is a builder who is not there on the morning something goes wrong.