Brock Lyster Houses

I was asked to bid on this job with several other contractors. The clients liked me and another contractor and asked that we join forces and work together on it. I think they liked my history of building in Laguna and they liked him from a previous job they had done with him. It was a first for me but the job was big and looked like a fun one so I agreed. I ended up being the one on site and took the job from demolition, shoring ,excavation, steel structure and through framing. It had a 17,000 square foot structural foot print, one half below grade and one half above grade. At the same time I was building a house across town that was the smallest house I have built at 1500 square feet.

I delivered the structure for them and set them off with a real strong start for their project. The house turned out great.

This is a brand new Victorian house is built on an ideal setting for the house. The clients already had most of their antiques to put in the house before we started to build. It was a real treat to be able to build a classic Victorian house. I feel like we came full circle in all of the houses that we have built and came back and paid tribute to the Queen !

This house is in the Strike Zone and gets battered by the ocean. The lot is very narrow and the cut was 25 feet vertical from the street. This job required serious braced shoring and we also had constant ground water to deal with. The structure was mainly concrete and steel due to all of the glass used to capitalize on the ocean view.

I was part of a forty man crew that built this house in 1975. This is where I really learned to build accurately. The concrete forms were lined with resawn clear cedar to give the concrete a wood texture. The siding was Mahogany and the doors and windows were both Teak and Aluminum.

The house was built in 1975 when I was starting my career and was 21 years old. I was contacted 25 years later to come replace the Teak deck due to the structural beams rotting. I came up with a way to replace the deck and make sure the beams would stay structurally sound for several more lifetimes.

At the time this house was built it was one of the biggest and most fantastic houses being built on the California Coast.

It is still incredible today.

I have built four large jobs that have gone two stories underground, and two with ground water. This is the biggest of them all. It all revolves around a very large Racquetball court in the center. Most of the yard above is built over basement below. The house is designed in the old world Provence style while at the same time the house is very high tech and has a large underground full of everything you could want in a house.

I built this house in 2000 and it was the first house where we used engineered lumber. Every board is straight and it really makes the house go together well.

We built the lift and glide doors, the doors and windows and the cabinets. We combined our crew with the foundation crew and did all of the framing and finish work with our own crew.

This was also the first Smart Home we built with total home automation and lighting control. The client put off selecting equipment because it was changing so fast and he wanted the latest and greatest. He got it as he wanted it the when the job was completed.

If you look at the photos closely, you can see the groundwater oozing out of the ground at about twelve feet below grade. We had to set up a collection pit at the bottom of the excavation and keep the pumps running while we built the permanent catch basin to pump the water up to the street. We also set it up so that he could use the ground water to water his garden.

This is one of the houses I rebuilt after the Laguna Beach fire in 1993 for some very good friends. The architects are David Smith and Kim Pederson of World Famous Architects, WFA. I built four houses for David and Kim and they were great to work with.

This is one of the few, if not the only, Modern House in Newport Coast.

When I first met with the architects they were wanting to make sure that I was aware that the house was modern and did not have the usual trim work that most houses have. I assured them that I had grown up in a modern wood and glass house that had no trim, and had also built several modern houses with no trim. They must have been pretty worried because they asked me this question several times.

Modern houses require more perfect construction because you cannot use the trim to hide the imperfections in the drywall, plaster, and door and window work. 

This is a very large house that required massive shoring steel beams as well as very large caissons since the hillside was bedded towards this site. We had many building materials shipped from overseas and worked with the designer, Juan Paublo Molyneux from New York City.

Massive pieces of Limestone were attached to the structure and required special engineering due to their weight for long term safety.

When I was getting ready to start this project, I was at a grading meeting and the soils engineer said to me, "I sure don't envy you". I was 39 years old, this was one of the biggest houses to be built in Laguna Beach, it had the biggest excavation, shoring, caissons, and foundation system as well. I had the best soils engineer, the best structural engineer, a great set of plans, and I was ready to go. I told him," It does not get any better than this. Let's build it!" 

This was a very traditional home and we all enjoyed the challenge of buildng it. In addition to working on the shoring and foundation with the foundation crew, our crew did the framing, finish work, built the doors and windows and the cabinets. 

This house was built for a Bechtol Engineer. He was overseas most of the time I was building for him. It was the first house on Dolphin Terrace to have a level below grade. At the same time I built this house I was building another one on Dolphin Terrace as well as an oceanfront in Laguna Beach.

This is another one of my favorite projects. We took the original house down, added a basement underneath, and built the house back with a few changes and additions, and made it stronger so it will last a few more lifetimes. We built through one of our rainiest winters and manged to get the project done in one year which is very rare. 

This was the first house built in upper Irvine Cove. We had this whole new development to ourselves. 

We completed this 6,000 square foot house in one year, which is very rare but can be achieved.

The architect, Jim Lashley, used tile in a really fun way on his houses. I remember admiring his use of tile when I was still going to high school in the early seventies. He created an exterior concrete path with stairs and the tile was installed to look like water flowing down the path and stairs.

You can see in this driveway the stream like path  made of pebbles in the concrete.

This is the third oceanfront house I built that Chris designed. Engineered lumber was starting to be manufactured and a new product came out called Mattwood and it was engineered lumber that was meant to be exposed. We used it for all of the exposed lumber, the doors and jambs, and the stairway system.

This house was a real cliff hanger and was fun to build. We built the foundation, did the framing as well as the finish work.

This house is oceanfront in Crescent Bay. It has 22 pieces of curved glass set in Mahogany frames that we built on site. We also fabricated the curved structural beams as well. The interior had bullnose plaster and this was the first job where we created a kerf cut into the jamb and cut down a bullnose corner to creat a bullnose to jamb detail. This was 1988 and there were no bullnose aids being made at the time. This created a very accurate detail for the plaster to meet up to the Mahogany jambs. This house had 13 different roofs and a lot of exposed woodwork. 

This house is 28 years old and still looks great.

This is the first of three oceanfront houses I would build that were designed by Chris Abel. It was also my first project when I started general contracting as Brock Lyster Construction in 1985. 

It was a a modern wood and glass, post and beam house with the majority of the wood structure exposed. We made all of the windows and doors out of Teak. We also built the foundation, did the framing and all of the finish carpentry. 

This is where we decided, now that we were in a position to as General Contractors, to build as close to perfect as possible. We had to be reasonable about it as we still had to move along at a fast clip, but we did all we could to stay true to being on dimension, straight, level and square. It worked so well on this first job that we have continued with the perfection approach on all of our jobs since this start.

We have found that if you put the effort into doing the work accurately at every step of the way you save time. It takes more time to do it wrong and correct it than to do it right the first time. The key is you have to have the knowledge, ability and desire to get it right the first time. This is the focus of our work.

This house was built in 1920 and I remodeled it in 1979. We repaired all of the existing doors and windows, replastered the exterior as needed to match the original finish and replastered the interior with imperial plaster. The trick with the old ones is to make it look like you you were never there.

My Dad and Mom, Tom and Jackie Lyster, built this house in 1963. Lamont Langworthy was the architect. It is a Mid-Century Modern house made of wood and glass. All of the framing is exposed so you can really see how the house is put together. I was nine years old when this house was built and it influenced my design sense and appreciation of architecture. Six years later I was working as a carpenter and learning to build houses starting at fifteen years old.

These photographs were taken by Julius Shulman.

You can contact me at

brocklyster@mac.com

949-874-1641