Meet the Garden Grove Team Behind Ellery ADU Studio Garden Grove
Every ADU we’ve put through plan check in Garden Grove since 2015 has been touched by this crew. They’re the people who measure your existing slab at 7 a.m., argue with a city inspector about fire separation at 3 p.m., and text you a photo of your rough electrical before they leave. What ties them together isn’t cheerfulness. It’s that none of them will sign off on work they wouldn’t put their own name on.
Our People
Nadia Ellery, Owner
I started this studio in 2015 after watching a garage conversion in Westminster go sideways - three different contractors, two permit rejections, and a homeowner who still didn’t have a certificate of occupancy eight months in. I’d spent the prior years working plan check queues in Orange County and figured there had to be a cleaner way to run a job. The Haven Standard came out of that: written price first, photo record every visit, and a 365-Day Done Right Promise that actually gets enforced. I still walk every site before we sign a contract, and I still answer calls when the live person is on another line. My license number is on every page of this site because I want you to look it up, not trust me.
Marcus T., Lead Technician
Marcus has been running field operations for Ellery since 2019, which means he’s the one who figures out why your 1950s Garden Grove garage slab is two inches thinner on the north end and what that does to your foundation line item. He holds a California B-General Contractor license and spent six years before us doing structural retrofits in Santa Ana, so he’s unusually comfortable opening up a wall and reading what happened. He keeps a battered copy of the CBC (California Building Code) in his truck, updated with his own sticky notes from plan-check conversations. Off hours, he restores vintage motorcycles and applies the same tolerance for deviation: if the frame is off by an eighth, he notices.
Lena R., Senior Installer
Lena handles the finish trades - electrical rough, plumbing fixtures, drywall, paint - and she’s particular about sequence in a way that saves us rework. She came up through the IBEW Local 441 apprenticeship in Orange County and carries both a C-10 electrical and a C-36 plumbing license, which matters on ADUs where combining trades under one contract means one person actually has to know both. Her specialty is prefab coordination: she’s the one who verifies that an Abodu or Cover module will clear your driveway in Garden Grove’s West Grove neighborhood, where the streets are narrower than the spec sheet assumes. She has a dog named Permit. That was her contractor father’s joke, and she kept it.
Danny K., Service Coordinator
Danny is who you talk to when you call (657) 567-6590. He’s been with us since 2021 and knows the Garden Grove permit timeline better than most city planners - which submittal window is backed up, which plan checker asks for wet-stamped soils reports on every job, how long the fire department typically takes on a garage conversion ADU in the Brookhurst corridor. He schedules site visits, chases permit status, and sends you the photo record links after every appointment. Before Ellery, he coordinated logistics for a commercial concrete outfit, so he’s not fazed by the thousand small dependencies of a construction job. He surfs San Onofre when the swell is right and has strong opinions about which taco spot in Garden Grove is actually worth the wait.
Javi M., Apprentice
Javi joined us in 2023 through the Orange County Construction Trades apprenticeship pipeline and is working toward his B license under Marcus’s supervision. Right now he does a lot of the work that doesn’t photograph well - demo, haul-out, site protection, material staging - but he’s also the one who notices when a delivery doesn’t match the cut sheet before it gets installed. He’s learning to read architectural plans and has started running the preliminary as-built measurements on smaller jobs. He grew up in a converted garage himself, off Chapman Avenue, which gives him a direct understanding of what the space means to the families we build for. He’s trying to convince Lena to let him wire his first outlet solo. She’s not there yet.
One Standard, Every Job
The Haven Standard isn’t a poster on a wall. It’s the contract language we all work under, whether the job is a junior ADU off Euclid Street or a new detached unit in the Strawberry District. Clause 1 means Marcus won’t start demo until you’ve seen and signed the written price. Clause 5 means Lena can’t add a scope item at the door without Danny running it through the same approval process. The 365-Day Done Right Promise means if Javi’s first solo outlet doesn’t pass inspection, we come back and fix it, documented in writing before we start.
We’ve designed, permitted, and built more than 900 ADUs since 2015. Every one of them has a photo record. Every one had a written price before work started. The team in Garden Grove operates the same way our crews do across California - not because someone in an office requires it, but because Nadia Ellery still walks sites and still enforces it. If you want to know how that applies to your property, call (657) 567-6590. A live person answers. Ask for Danny.
Written by Nadia Ellery, Owner at Ellery ADU Studio Garden Grove, serving Garden Grove since 2015.