Annangrove House, pool, cabana and terraced grounds from above

The name on the contract is the name on site.

Birch Residential has been building across Sydney since 2011 — more than eighty projects, and the same person on every one of them from the first site visit to handover.

Front portico and entry of a completed Birch Residential home

Who you are dealing with

Birch Residential is Brad, and a book of trades he has used for years.

Trading as Buildabel Pty Ltd, Birch has been building since 2011 — more than eighty projects across Sydney’s Hills district, Ryde and the inner west. New homes, renovations, knockdown rebuilds, and the pools and landscaping that finish them, all on lump sum contracts.

It has stayed deliberately small. Brad prices the job, engages the trades, runs the site and walks the finished house with you at handover. There is no estimator who hands you to a salesperson who hands you to a supervisor, and no project manager you meet for the first time when something has already gone wrong.

One person can only carry so many houses at once. That is the trade-off, and it is a deliberate one — it is also the only reason the same face can be there at the quote, the frame inspection and the handover walk.

2011Building since

80+Projects completed

8Homes documented here

1Point of contact

In practice

Four things that are different,
and what each one costs us.

Every builder says they communicate well and care about quality. None of that is checkable. These four are, and each of them has a real trade-off attached.

One point of contact

The person who prices your home is the person who runs the site and the person who hands it over. Every question has one address, and nobody can tell you it is somebody else’s part of the job.

The cost: fewer houses running at once

One contract sum

Lump sum, agreed before construction starts, with the provisional sums and prime cost items listed separately so you can see which numbers are fixed and which are allowances against things nobody can know yet.

The cost: the quote takes longer to produce

The outside is not a second job

Pool, retaining, driveway, fencing and planting sit in the same contract as the house, built by the same team while the site is still open. No second company, no second set of dates, no argument about who was meant to leave the level right.

The cost: we say no to houses we cannot finish outside

Built so it can still change

Conventional stick framing on site rather than prefabricated panels craned in. It is slower on paper. It is why a wall can move, a ceiling can lift or an opening can widen while the house is going up, instead of being locked the day the frame was ordered.

The cost: slower framing, every time

Credentials

Everything here is checkable.

There are no awards on this page, because there are none to show. What is here instead is the paperwork — and every line of it can be verified without asking us.

NSW builder licence: 274764C; Search it on the NSW Fair Trading licence register. It takes about a minute, it tells you the class of work the licence covers and whether it is current, and you should do it for every builder you speak to — including this one.
Insurance: Home Building Compensation Fund; Cover arranged through icare NSW. A certificate is issued per job, before work starts and before any deposit is taken, and it names the property it covers.
Memberships: Master Builders Association
Housing Industry Association; Both bodies publish searchable member directories, so this is checkable too.
Legal entity: Buildabel Pty Ltd; Trading as Birch Residential. ABN 79 154 856 363 — the contract will be in this name, so it is worth knowing before you see it on the front page.
Contracts: Lump sum; One inclusive figure agreed before construction starts. Both allowance lists — provisional sums and prime cost items — are itemised and handed over with the contract, not discovered later.
Postal: PO Box 6133, Norwest NSW 2153; Birch works from site rather than a display office, so there is no showroom to visit. Meetings happen on your block, which is the more useful place to have them.

What we believe

Luxury you can live in.
Built the right way.

Every Birch home is built to one standard, and it is a high one. There is one way to build something properly, and that is the way it gets built. Whatever the scope, the quality of the materials is never where the saving comes from — the size of the house can change, the standard does not.

Design that considers how a house should look, built by someone who knows how it actually has to go together. A designer who can be held to a budget; a builder who respects the brief he was given. A home that stands out because it is particular to the people living in it, not because of what it cost.

Where we build

Across Sydney.

The Hills district and Ryde are home ground — that is where most of the work since 2011 sits. Brad also takes projects through the inner west, and has built in most parts of Sydney over the years.

The completed houses on this site are at Annangrove, Cattai, Pitt Town, North Kellyville, Bella Vista, Ryde and East Ryde — acreage, suburban lots, a duplex pair and a knockdown rebuild.

The HillsRydeInner WestHawkesburyNorth-west SydneyGreater Sydney

The work