Second story additions in Mountain Brook

Mountain Brook was planned once, beautifully, in the 1920s — Robert Jemison's landscape plan laid out the three villages, wound the roads through the ridges, and reserved roughly a third of the city as green space — and that plan has essentially held ever since. The English Village, Crestline, and Mountain Brook Village houses that came out of it, with their Tudor lines and steep rooflines, are the reason people wait years to buy here. It also means the city cannot grow outward: when a Mountain Brook family needs more house, the supply of Mountain Brook is not going to expand to meet them.

A second story addition is how these houses grow without leaving the plan that makes them valuable. The bar is craftsmanship: on a 1920s or 30s Tudor, the new level has to carry the brick and stone, the steep pitch, the arched details — so the finished house reads as if Jemison's architects drew it that way. That is a design and masonry problem before it is a framing problem, and it is the credibility test for anyone building in this city. Precision Homecrafters designs to that test, engineering the existing foundation and walls first and matching the original architecture piece by piece.

The practical side is smoother than most owners expect: Mountain Brook permits run through the city's Planning, Building and Sustainability department, the city has adopted the current generation of building codes, and its own guidance is that permits are typically issued within a couple of business days once submitted. Construction uses the weatherproof-above-the-roof sequence — the new level is framed and dried-in above your existing roof before the old roof is removed — so the household below stays sealed and settled, and the family stays in the school system it came here for.

Neighborhoods we serve in Mountain Brook

ZIP codes served: 35213 · 35223