Design-build · Charleston, S.C. · Since 2011
For Charleston’s old houses, and the people who keep them.
Kitchens, baths, whole-home renovation and millwork from our own shop — designed and built under one roof, on one schedule, with one person to call.
01Work
01 / 06
The index
Every project, by room
In focus · No. 06
Three rooms, one steel beam, one eleven-hour day.
We opened the center of a 1998 house to its roofline. The beam that made it possible was engineered, permitted and set in a single day, so the house was open to the weather for hours, not weeks. The schedule held within four days of nine months.
02Process
Phase
Duration
Log scale · solid = shortest, dashed = longest
- 01
Discovery
A ninety-minute consultation in your home, followed by a written scope and an honest investment range — before you've committed to anything.
1–2 weeks - 02
Design
Measured drawings, a materials direction you can see and touch, and — where the house requires it — a Board of Architectural Review submission.
6–10 weeks - 03
Pricing
A fixed-price construction proposal, line by line, with no allowances hiding a number we'll discover later.
2–3 weeks - 04
Build
Jonah runs the schedule and the site; Theo's crew does the work. A weekly update, every Friday, whether there's news or not.
10 weeks – 11 months - 05
Reveal
A final walkthrough with a punch list resolved before we call it finished, not after — and a warranty that means what it says.
1 day
03Studio
A designer and a builder who stopped working separately.
Alder & Stone was founded in 2011 by Elena Marsh and Theo Alder — a designer and a builder who kept getting hired separately for the same houses and decided the handoff between design and construction was where good projects went to die.
We keep our own construction crew and our own millwork shop in North Charleston rather than subcontracting the parts that matter most. It's slower to scale a company this way. It's the only way we've found to guarantee the joinery in your library is the same quality as the joinery in the last one.
From the sample room
Every stone, wood and metal we specify is sampled in your house, in morning and evening light, before anything is ordered. A few from recent projects — choose one.
Sample 01 of 12
Calacatta marble
Book-matched waterfall island, honed finish.
Elena saw things in our Tradd Street kitchen we didn't know to ask for — the pass-through to the porch, the marble that reads warm instead of cold in evening light. Eight months later it still feels like the best decision we made about this house.
If you have a house in mind
Begin a project
Ninety minutes, in your home or our studio on Meeting Street, ending with a written scope and an honest number — before you have committed to anything. Imani Brooks schedules every first visit.