Meet Holland & Sons.

Brian Holland did not grow up dreaming of building houses. He dropped out of high school at seventeen, and his father gave him a simple choice: get a full-time job or start paying rent. The neighbors across the street were framers with cool cars. Brian started hanging around for the cars. He stayed for the work.

That was on custom-home framing crews up and down coastal Southern California, in an era when the pace was brutal and the crews were rougher than anything allowed today. Brian loved every bit of it: the camaraderie, the physical challenge, the culture of guys who were hard on you at first just to see if you would keep showing up. The day he stood his first roof, three stories up with no way back down but through, something clicked. This was who he was going to be.

Thirty-five years later, that is still true, but the path in between was not a straight line. A construction injury once pulled him off the tools entirely, so he taught himself to type, learned the business by listening to people who had done it, built a resume out of sheer nerve, borrowed a suit, and talked his way into a Wall Street mortgage firm he had no business getting into. He made it work, and rode that experience into the 2008 crash, where he pivoted to buying distressed houses, fixing them himself, and learning to build real wealth instead of just building walls. By his early forties, real estate had given him the kind of security he never dreamed of growing up. Fatherhood is what made it stick.

Today, Brian runs Holland & Sons Construction alongside his two sons, Wyatt and Waylon, who are on every job with him. What used to be pure hammer-and-nails has become something bigger: a genuine obsession with classical proportion, the golden ratio, and hand-drawn architectural design, paired with joinery and craftsmanship methods most contractors have quietly abandoned. Brian sketches it, then builds it. Design and execution living in the same hands.

The mentorship Brian had in his twenties was rough and often destructive. The mentorship he gives now is deliberate: work hard, still have fun, and learn to save and grow instead of burning it all down. This is a quality business, not a volume business, built by someone who has lived through the mistakes and come out the other side determined to build something that lasts, for his family's name and for everyone who works alongside it.

Wyatt is a junior carpenter at Holland & Sons, and an experienced one. After years on the crew learning alongside Brian, he has become the one reaching for the tools on the trickiest parts of a job. He has always liked working with his hands, and it shows in the work he takes pride in: the trickier the better. Ask him about a project he is proud of and he will point to the white oak paneling he installed above a staircase, a piece that gave him real trouble getting the fit and angles right, and one he still points to as proof of what he can do when a job pushes back.

Carpentry was not necessarily the plan from day one, but the more time he spends on it, the more it has grown on him. He is closing in on running work of his own, and it shows every time he is handed something difficult. Outside of work he is out on dirt bikes and BMX with his brother Waylon. Ask Wyatt what matters most to him on a job and the answer is simple: he wants the customer happy with the work.