General Contractor on the Westside of Los Angeles

Green Design and Build is a licensed residential general contractor (CSLB #1110975) based at 16120 Sherman Way in Van Nuys. This page covers the three Westside cities we have written full guides for: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Each runs its own building department rather than LADBS, with review steps and construction-hours rules that stretch a schedule.

West Hollywood is about 12 miles from our office over Laurel Canyon. Westside projects are a 20 to 45 minute drive from Van Nuys, are staffed like local jobs, and carry no travel premium.

Three cities, three building departments

Westwood, Brentwood, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades and Venice are inside the City of Los Angeles and go through LADBS. These three are not.

• Santa Monica: its own Building and Safety division, with plans submitted through ProjectDox. Single-family projects that add or modify plumbing fixtures must file a Water Meter Sizing Questionnaire, and a large part of the city is inside the Coastal Zone, where a Coastal Development Permit can be needed too.
• Beverly Hills: the Building and Safety Division at City Hall, 455 N. Rexford Drive. Design review is mandatory for exterior changes in the Central R-1 zone, and hillside lots can need a discretionary Hillside R-1 Permit.
• West Hollywood: Building and Safety at 8300 Santa Monica Boulevard, online-only submission. On occupied rental property a Tenant Habitability Plan must be approved by the Rent Stabilization Division before permits issue, and contractors need a West Hollywood business tax certificate, which we hold.

What Westside houses are made of

Santa Monica’s housing stock is older than most of our service area: Spanish Colonial Revival and Craftsman bungalows from the 1920s and 1930s, then post-war stucco. In houses of that age we expect to find knob-and-tube wiring, galvanized supply lines, cast iron drain lines, and raised foundations with cripple walls that were never bolted to the sill.

West Hollywood is different: roughly 88 percent of its homes are in multifamily buildings and about 80 percent of occupied units are rented, so most remodel work there happens inside a condominium or an apartment, with the association or owner part of the approval.

ADUs on the Westside

State ADU law sets a floor that every one of these cities has to meet, and our ADU rules calculator shows what that floor is for your lot. What differs is the overlay. In Beverly Hills the maximum ADU size depends on where in the city you are: 1,200 square feet in the Central Area south of Santa Monica Boulevard, 1,400 north of it, and 850 to 1,000 square feet in Trousdale Estates. In West Hollywood, on a multifamily lot the city allows converted ADUs up to 25 percent of the existing number of units, created from non-livable space such as storage rooms and garages.

A garage conversion ADU runs $100,000 to $200,000 as a typical Los Angeles budgeting range, and a detached unit $180,000 to $260,000 for 400 to 500 square feet; these are budgeting estimates, not a quote. Our ADU page covers the rest.

What we build most here

• Whole-home renovations of 1920s to 1950s houses, where wiring, plumbing and windows are dealt with at the same time as the kitchen and bathrooms.
• Kitchen remodels, very often opening up a closed original plan, which usually means removing a load-bearing wall with an engineer, a beam and a plan check.
• Bathroom remodels, including full shower rebuilds in West Hollywood condominiums and primary suite reconfiguration in Beverly Hills.
• Room additions on small lots, including second-story additions, where setbacks and lot coverage decide what is possible.
• ADUs and garage conversions under the area-specific limits above.
• Foundation and structural work, including bolting and cripple wall bracing on raised-foundation houses.

Working on a Westside street

In Beverly Hills, permitted work is prohibited on weekdays between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., all day Saturday within 500 feet of a residential zone, and on Sundays and holidays, so a Beverly Hills job runs on a five-day week. In West Hollywood, construction hours are Monday to Friday 8 AM to 7 PM with Saturday interior work only, and crews may not park on the street. Santa Monica is a city where neighbors notice, so we plan staging, parking and delivery windows before work starts.

City guides

• General contractor in Santa Monica: ProjectDox, the water meter questionnaire and the Coastal Zone.
• General contractor in Beverly Hills: design review, the Hillside R-1 Permit and ADU limits by area.
• General contractor in West Hollywood: the Tenant Habitability Plan, historic review and multifamily ADUs.
• See also our Los Angeles County page and our San Fernando Valley page, or every area we serve.

Plan your Westside project

Send us your address and what you have in mind. We will walk the house, tell you which department and review steps apply, and give you a written, itemized estimate. The site visit and the estimate are free, and our design-build process page sets out each stage after that.

These are each city’s own rules and can change; confirm what applies to your address with the department before you plan around a date.