About
A general contractor working across Northern and Southern California, building and renovating since 2002.
Vivere Construction is a design-build firm. We take on fire rebuilds, new construction, ADUs and remodels, and we run them ourselves rather than handing them to a subcontractor and hoping.
- CSLB #839135
- Licensed, bonded and insured
- 24 years
- Building and renovating since 2002
- 150+ projects
- Across Northern and Southern California
- Design-build
- Drawings and construction under one contract
How we work.
We are a design-build firm, which means the drawings and the construction sit under one contract. There is one party responsible when a detail on the plan meets a condition on the site, and it is us. If you already have an architect you like, we will build from their set instead. That works too.
Every project gets one project manager from permit through final inspection, a written update each week, and photographs of every stage. The photographs on this site are those photographs. Nothing on here is a stock image of somebody else’s house.
Since the January 2025 fires, a large part of our work has been ground-up rebuilds in Altadena. That work is slower and more administrative than most construction, and the people going through it have usually already had the worst year of their lives. We try to be straightforward about what we can and cannot control.
Check us.
Our California licence is CSLB #839135. You can look it up yourself and see the status, classification, bond and workers’ compensation.
We would encourage you to do that with any contractor you are considering. It takes a minute and it filters out most of what goes wrong on residential projects.
The team
The people you will be working with.
Sal started Vivere in 2002 and still decides which jobs it takes. He sets what finished has to look like before a job is handed back, and he is reachable by the people paying for it. Most of the work now comes from clients who have built with us before, or were sent by someone who has.
Nick runs the company day to day: what gets scheduled, who is on it, and what happens when two jobs need the same crew on the same morning. He has been around Vivere for most of his working life and knows what each crew can actually take on, which is why the schedule holds.
Charmaine runs the projects. She knows which trade is on site on Thursday, what the inspector will want before he arrives, and what a change in week six does to the rest of the schedule. What clients experience as a job going smoothly is mostly her.
Lida handles the money and, more usefully, explains it. She came from real estate and mortgage finance, so she is used to talking numbers with the person spending them. Draw schedules, change orders and what a line item actually covers all come from her.
Ken holds the licence and runs the builds. Twenty-five years of new construction, fire rebuilds and structural remodels, which in practice shows up as knowing what a drawing will cost to frame before anyone orders material.
Junior is the one on site. New construction and remodels, and specifically the part of a build where the plan meets a wall that is not where the plan said it would be. He decides how that gets solved, and it usually gets solved the same day.
Jacqueline keeps the jobs moving: trades booked, materials on site before the crew is, and the client told before they have to ask. She came up working alongside the trades, so the schedule she writes is one they can hold to.
Ramin draws the houses. Civil engineering behind him and residential design in front of it, which means what he hands over is buildable as drawn rather than beautiful and impossible. He runs his own design practice and stays with a project through the whole design stage instead of handing over a set of plans and leaving.
Ricardo builds what the company runs on: how a job is tracked, how a decision gets recorded, how fast a question gets an answer. None of it is visible from outside, which is the test of whether it is working. What is visible is that nobody has to chase us to find out where their build has got to.
Hazel holds the paperwork a job cannot start without: permits, plan corrections, vendor terms, insurance, and the record of what was agreed and when. It is work nobody notices until a permit runs late, and on her watch it does not.
Where we work
Northern and Southern California.
Our office is in Upland, and we work at both ends of the state. The cities below are the Los Angeles County ones we are in most often, and each has a page of its own. If yours is not on the list, call and ask, because the answer is usually yes.
Come and see what we have built.
Or have us come and see what you want to build. The first visit is free and there is no decision to make on the day.