Colony Home Improvement

Colony Home Improvement is a Needham design-build shop built around additions, kitchen and bath remodels, and whole-home renovations — the company says it's been doing this work in Massachusetts for more than 40 years, and it's long been fronted by Lenny Gillis, whose name turns up in nearly every review on file. The written record splits into two eras. A run of detailed Houzz reviews from 2013 to 2015 describes big design-build jobs — a gutted kitchen and living room, a three-season porch turned four-season sunroom, a whole-house addition carried through the town's special-permit process — with homeowners crediting Gillis for personally managing architects, subcontractors, and town approvals. More recently, Google reviews from 2024 through early 2026 describe smaller-scale work: a kitchen remodel in Newton, a deck renovation, and a drafty attached garage turned into a year-round room that one homeowner says they worked from all through the pandemic without regret. One review breaks the pattern. In a 2021 Google review, a caller describes Gillis refusing to consider a small 12x12 bedroom addition without a $50,000 commitment upfront, and calling it the rudest business conversation they'd had about a home project. It's the one sour account in an otherwise consistent run, and it looks like a minimum-job-size mismatch rather than a complaint about finished work — worth asking about if your job is small. Its Massachusetts home improvement contractor registration is active. Separately, its BBB profile carries an A+ rating with accredited-business status, and on Google it holds 4.5 stars from 8 ratings; on Houzz, a perfect 5.0 from 5, including that string of detailed 2013–2015 accounts. This is a strong call for a homeowner planning a real addition, kitchen, or whole-home remodel who wants one person managing the process start to finish; for a small standalone job, confirm there's no minimum project size before you call.