Our approach
Cubist Engineering is a design and consulting firm specializing in custom spaces—small or large, prefab or site-built—but all with a modern aesthetic, innovative materials and lasting craftsmanship.
Focusing on commercial and residential structures, including single-family homes, guest suites and cabins, we can bring our unique experience as builders, technology nerds and design obsessives to your project. We can work as part of a larger team or be the primary designers. We can turn over your design to builders of your choice, or see a project all the way through construction with our building partners .
Across all our projects, a few things remain consistent ...
We build the building you want.
Every Cubist project is uniquely designed and engineered. We’ll start with our general aesthetic and palette of materials, but work with you to deliver the size, shape, finishes and features you want, built 98 percent complete in our shop, and delivered to your site ready to use with very little prep and setup. We come to work to solve new challenges, not to build the same thing over and over (maybe we’re easily bored?).
We use innovative materials.
Nothing against traditional stick framing, it’s just not our thing. Cubist builds are panelized construction, using either cross-laminated timber (the first we know of to use CLT in mobile structures) or graphite-based SIPs, on top of custom-engineered steel bases that transform from trailer to permanent foundation in under an hour. What can we say, we’re geeks who build.
We care about durability.
From our garapa-and-aluminum modular decks to our hot-dipped galvanized foundations to our shou sugi ban Accoya siding to our ipe trim, we spec finishes and materials designed to last decades. And every Cubist project is structurally engineered to withstand the most stringent weather and seismic requirements. If it’s not over-built, it’s probably not ours.
If it doesn’t exist, we invent it.
Sure, we could just drop a Murphy bed in our guest studio, but we didn’t. We created the Cubist Ceiling Bed: a cantilevered queen-size bed that nests in the ceiling and slides down steel rails with the push of a button at bedtime. Instead of just sticking a solar panel on the roof, we built a self-contained solar power station with batteries, inverters and panels on its own trailer. Hey, we did put “engineering” in the name …