S+H Construction

S+H Construction is a Belmont design-build firm that traces back to the late 1970s, when Alex Slive and Doug Hanna started it as a general contractor for Greater Boston homeowners — one press account gives 1978, another 1979. The company says it's now 45 years in and run by Sarah Lawson, who joined in 2006 and bought the firm about a decade later; a 2024 trade write-up described her taking over the business around the same time, after years working alongside the founders. It works custom homes, additions, historic restorations, kitchen and bathroom remodels, basement waterproofing, and landscaping across Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Belmont, Newton, Wellesley and Weston. There isn't a public review history to check here — what's public instead is trade recognition. The National Association of the Remodeling Industry named it 2013 Northeast Regional Contractor of the Year, back when it was based in Cambridge. A 2020 North Shore Magazine feature walked through one of its jobs, a 1925 colonial the piece called an "old beauty" that needed only minor updating rather than a full renovation. More recent coverage in 2025 and 2026 — a design-guide piece on new leadership, a kitchen-and-bath trade piece on a new division, and a piece on outdoor-living projects — keeps putting the firm in the same bracket of established Greater Boston design-build shops. Since there's no bank of homeowner reviews to weigh, a prospective client is mostly going on the company's own account and press coverage rather than firsthand accounts from people who hired them. For someone planning a custom home, an addition, or an older-home renovation in the Boston area, S+H's decades in business and its trade recognition make it worth a call — just ask directly for recent client references, since there isn't a public review history here yet to check.