Birch Residential is a custom home builder working across Sydney’s Hills district, Ryde and the inner west. New homes, renovations, knockdown rebuilds, and the pools and landscaping that finish them.
One contract
Most people building a house end up managing a designer, a certifier, a builder, a pool company and a landscaper who have never worked together and do not share a program. Birch runs all of it under one lump sum contract, with the person who priced the job answering for every part of it.
What we build
01
A house drawn around your block and the way you actually live, rather than a catalogue plan adjusted until it fits. On acreage that usually means orientation, fall and the approach to the house; on a suburban lot it means setbacks, privacy and where the afternoon sun lands.
02
The hard part of a renovation is the part nobody can see until the walls are open. So the pricing, the sequencing and the decisions are worked through before demolition starts — and where something genuinely cannot be known in advance, it is written down as an allowance instead of being quietly left out of the quote.
03
An extra stage on a Birch build or renovation, not a separate service — built by the team that built the house, while the site is still a site. That is the whole argument for it: a pool that has to meet the house at a particular level, a retaining wall that has to be there before the slab, a driveway that has to survive a concrete truck. Coordinating that across two contracts is where the arguments start.
04
Keep the land, replace the house. It tends to win when the block is right but the house is beyond economic repair, or when what you want simply cannot be reached by extending. Demolition, approvals and the new build run as one job on one contract, rather than three arrangements with three sets of dates and nobody holding the middle.
Our difference
Most of what goes wrong on a build is not a trade problem. It is a decision made without you, a change you find out about as an invoice, or a question that takes a week to reach the one person who can answer it. That is the part this is built around.
The person who walks your block is the person who prices the job, runs the site and hands you the keys. Nothing is lost being passed between a salesperson, an estimator and a site manager who have never met each other.
If something on site has to change, you are told before the work is done and you agree to it — not told afterwards, and not by way of a line on the next invoice.
One phone number, answered by the person actually building your house. No call centre, no reference number, no waiting to find out whose question it is.
The process
Building a house is a long time to spend not being sure what happens next. Each stage below ends in something you are holding, not a feeling that progress was made.
Send an address and a rough brief. We walk the block and look at what it can carry — fall, access, trees, sewer, easements, what the neighbours already built — before anyone draws anything or quotes anything.
You end with a straight answer on what the block will take
Plans developed around the site and the way you live, costed as they are drawn rather than at the end. This is the easiest point at which to change your mind, and the stage worth taking slowly.
You end with a plan you have seen, changed and agreed
DA or CDC, engineering and certification, then a lump sum built from the finished drawings. Provisional sums and prime cost items are listed separately, so you can see exactly which numbers are fixed and which are allowances.
You end with one contract sum and both allowance lists
Trades engaged and sequenced by the person who priced the job. Nothing is routed through a project manager you have never met, and nothing changes on site before you have heard about it and agreed to it.
You end with the house, on the sum you signed
Walked room by room with the same person who quoted it. Statutory warranty and Home Building Compensation Fund cover, arranged through icare NSW, stand behind the work after you have the keys.
You end with the keys, and someone who still answers
How we price
Birch works on lump sum contracts. One inclusive figure, agreed before construction starts, so the number you sign is the number you plan around. If something genuinely changes you hear it from Brad before it happens, not in an invoice afterwards.
Two things sit outside every fixed price in this industry, and any builder who tells you otherwise is worth walking away from. Provisional sums and prime cost items are allowances for things not yet chosen or not yet knowable — tapware you have not picked, rock nobody can see until the excavator arrives. Variations are work you ask for that was not in the signed scope.
Both lists exist on every job. Ours are handed over with the contract, itemised, before you sign anything. Ask every builder you talk to for the same thing.
How we build
Birch builds conventional stick-framed structures on site rather than craning in prefabricated frames. It is slower on paper. It is also the reason 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.
That flexibility is the point. The homes worth building are rarely the ones that survive first contact with a catalogue — and the change people most often want is the one they only see once they are standing inside the frame.
Where we build
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.
Completed houses on this site are at Annangrove, Cattai, Pitt Town, North Kellyville, Bella Vista, Ryde and East Ryde. If your block is somewhere else in Sydney, send the address anyway — the answer is a yes or a no, not a runaround.
Before you call
What a fixed price actually fixes. Whether a block is worth buying. DA or CDC. What a forty-year specification costs against a twenty-year one. Twelve questions worth asking any builder, including this one.
All of it is written down on the Learn page, with a full set of straight answers underneath — areas, licensing, contracts, timelines, and where you live during a rebuild.
Start a conversation
No obligation, no sales appointment, and no number invented before anyone has seen the block.