A mountain-modern home built into a south-facing slope, framed by ponderosa pines. Stone base, board-formed concrete, walnut interior. Designed around morning light and a long view to the east.
A small design-build firm working across the foothills and mountain communities of the Front Range. We design and build custom residences for clients who want a builder with a point of view.
Start a conversation →Most custom builders are contractors with a portfolio. They take what you give them—your architect's drawings, your wish list, your interior designer's specifications—and execute as faithfully as they can.
That's a fine service. It's not the service we offer.
Field & Frame is a design-build firm. We do the architecture and the construction as one project, with one team, on one timeline. Every decision—from the foundation to the door hardware—gets weighed against a single question: does this serve the home, the site, and the family who'll live in it for the next thirty years?
We are not architects executing design through a contractor. We are builders who design from the lumber yard up.
We say no to a lot. We won't build a house that doesn't fit its landscape. We won't use materials that won't last. We won't build something that looks like the last house we built. We don't build over ten thousand square feet. Every project starts with the site, the family, and a clean sheet of paper.
If that sounds like the firm you want building your home, let's talk.
Each one was built once, for one site, for one family. Every project starts with a site visit and ends with a five-year warranty package.
A mountain-modern home built into a south-facing slope, framed by ponderosa pines. Stone base, board-formed concrete, walnut interior. Designed around morning light and a long view to the east.
A ski-side retreat for a family of seven. Hand-hewn timber framing, board-formed concrete, a south-facing great room with twenty-foot glass.
A 1970s ranch reimagined for a family of five. Opened to the landscape it always belonged to.
A compact mountain cabin for a family of four. Built with materials sourced within forty miles of the site.
Stone and walnut, a single low roofline, and a great room that opens to the foothills.
A home for a couple's third act. Designed around morning light, a long view to the Flatirons, and rooms that work as well for two as for a full house of guests.
A 1925 Spanish Revival in Denver's Country Club neighborhood, reimagined for a family of four. Restored facade and original tilework; reorganized interiors around modern living patterns. A two-year project with the Denver Landmark Preservation Commission.
Before any drawing happens, Jake walks the land with you. We understand orientation, drainage, the trees worth keeping, where the light falls in winter. The site shapes everything that comes after.
A series of meetings about your family, your routines, your priorities, your constraints. How do you live now? How do you want to live? What gets in your way? The house solves problems you might not yet have named.
We design the house. Architectural drawings, structural decisions, material selections, interior fundamentals. Every decision is made with the budget and the timeline locked in front of us—so there are no surprises later.
Construction is run by the same team that designed the house. Our crews are in-house, not subcontracted. Weekly walkthroughs. Monthly client meetings. Decisions resolved in days, not weeks. We finish on time, on budget—every time.
When we hand you the keys, we hand you a full documentation package: drawings, material specs, maintenance schedules, supplier and trade contacts. Five years of post-build support is included with every project.
Jake Caldwell grew up in a finish carpenter's shop in Salida, Colorado—sweeping sawdust at eight, swinging hammers by fourteen, running his own four-person carpentry crew across central Colorado by twenty-five. He didn't go to architecture school. Not at first.
He kept running into the same problem on jobs: clients would hire him to do trim or built-ins, then ask him to redesign things mid-build—the kitchen, the master suite, sometimes an entire floor plan. He'd push back to the architect on their behalf. Usually he'd be told the design had been approved and couldn't change. He watched homes get built that the owners didn't quite love.
In 2014, while doing carpentry on a new home in Genesee, Jake watched a client cry in her unfinished primary bathroom. The home was 8,400 square feet. She had wanted half that. She had said so during design. She had been overruled by the resale argument.
Jake went home that night and sketched the home he would have built for them. Six months later, in his architecture coursework at CU Denver, he learned about the design-build model—and Field & Frame got built around it.
We take on a limited number of new projects each year. The best time to start a conversation is twelve to eighteen months before you'd want to break ground.
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