Fourteen months that don't feel like fourteen months.
A custom home is a long project. The job of a builder is not to make it short — it is to make every month feel deliberate. This is how Summerland does it, phase by phase.
The rooms in a Summerland home make sense before a single permit is filed.
Every plan gets walked the way an architect walks it — proportions, flow, the way light moves through a room, where a door wants to be, what a lot is asking for. Mercedes has both a Degree in Architecture to read a drawing that way and the contractor's knowledge of what can actually be built well on this lot. A kitchen island rotated ninety degrees. An entry moved to the side of the house the lot is asking for. A roofline simplified so the structure costs less and ages better.
Most contractors price the drawings and pour. We change what shouldn't be built before it becomes a foundation.
62 Andros Road · Key Largo
The drawings stopped at code-minimum elevation. Mercedes saw that lifting the home by one and a half feet would clear the flood-zone requirement —
of unusable ground floor turned into finished living space.
That is the kind of thing only someone trained as an architect catches before the slab gets poured.
In Monroe County, a luxury custom home doesn't get built without surviving the permit.
Flood elevation, wind code, environmental review, septic, dock — each is its own desk, its own reviewer, its own backlog. Mercedes has been submitting to the same building department for over twenty years. The people who review her plans know her work. She knows their preferences, their red lines, and which questions they'll ask before they ask them.
Permits don't sit in purgatory on a Summerland build.
Mercedes lives in Key Largo.
A subcontractor's question doesn't sit until tomorrow because someone is stuck in Miami traffic — it gets answered today, on the lot. The same goes for you. When you want to know where your build is, you call. We pick up — usually from the site, often within the hour.
Your build is never a project you have to chase.
704 Grouper Lane · Key Largo
A 1960s canal-front cottage in Sunset Point came in needing a full remodel. The existing roof had usable space underneath that the original plans treated as exterior. We enclosed it, added air-conditioned square footage, and brought the whole house current to today's flood and wind code — finished turnkey, pool and dock included, in one continuous build.
We walk the home through. We hand over the keys. The build is done — but the relationship isn't.
Mercedes picks up the phone. Even on a Sunday night. Months and years after the closing, when something in the house needs attention, the answer isn't a warranty form or a service ticket. It's Mercedes, at your house.
That is what twenty years of staying in business in the Florida Keys looks like.
Where does this begin? With a conversation.
Schedule a consultation with Mercedes. Bring questions, a lot address, or just a sketch on the back of an envelope.