Columbia Contracting, Corp.

Columbia Contracting is a Natick, Massachusetts builder built around one thing: custom, architecturally designed residential work — new homes, historic renovations, additions — with the principal personally handling each project's zoning and permitting. Arthur Massaro founded the company in 1980; Kate Durrane, who has run it since 2020, is now its single point of contact on jobs. The company's deepest credential isn't a review count — it's four decades of relationships. Boston Design Guide has featured its work more than once since 2015, including a custom Italian-style home outside Boston and a build squeezed into a 27-foot-wide lot with barely 2.5 feet of alley access. It's also a longtime Partner in Craft with the North Bennet Street School, hiring NBSS-trained carpenters and sitting on the school's Carpentry Advisory Committee — one NBSS writer even had Massaro build her deck back in 1983 and return for extensive work since. The one written review on file, from 2017 on Houzz, describes hiring the company twice and calling out its "responsiveness to problems, and ability to solve them" along with an "excellent sense of design." It's dated, but it lines up with everything else here — a company people come back to rather than hire once. A few things worth knowing before calling: its Massachusetts home improvement contractor registration (#121477) is active and state-verified, and it carries an A+ Better Business Bureau rating, though it isn't BBB-accredited. Written reviews are thin — just that one 2017 Houzz rating, and BuildZoom shows none at all — so most of what you're evaluating here is reputation and relationships rather than a stack of recent star ratings. BuildZoom also notes two Newton-issued licenses on the company's record that are now inactive; the active, state-verified registration is the Massachusetts one above. Columbia Contracting reads like the right call for a homeowner planning a real project — an addition, a gut renovation, a custom build — who wants one person managing the whole thing and cares more about a forty-plus-year track record than a wall of recent reviews. Worth asking directly about current project timelines and getting a few recent references, since the public record here is long on credibility and short on recent, dated customer accounts.