Early American Restoration

Early American Restoration is built around an unusual and specific skill: taking historic windows and woodwork apart and putting them back so the original material stays in the building. Its founder, Duane Houghton, holds a Master's Degree in Historic Preservation from Roger Williams University, served as Preservation Manager at Historic New England, and the company credits him with more than 30 years of construction experience; co-founder Ash Houghton leads the window work. The firm dates itself to 2016 and previously traded as Duane D Houghton LLC. It describes itself as a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. The customer trail is short. The single Google review, from 2021, isn't even about a restoration — a customer needed several holes drilled on a drill press and wrote that Duane made time for the small job and treated it as though it mattered. More telling is a Littleton municipal document: a preservation funding request that based its budget on an estimate from Early American Restoration, calls them the company that did the windows, and describes them as careful, thorough and reliable. Elsewhere the paper trail is directory-thin. The BBB gives an A+ but the company is not accredited, and lists the LLC as started in 2016 with one employee. Houzz shows ten projects — a Sudbury kitchen, historic restoration, window replacements, home extensions, custom staircases — though that profile is currently marked suspended and carries no reviews. If you own an old house in MetroWest and need windows, millwork or a whole-building preservation plan handled by someone who studied the discipline, this is a rare shape of shop. Go in knowing there is almost no public customer history to lean on: ask for references from recent historic projects, and settle who will actually be on site, since the BBB lists a single employee.