Custom Gate Design & Installation for Bay Area Homes

Every custom build starts with a walk of your property. We photograph the entrance from the street, from the porch, and from inside the car at the driveway approach — the angle you'll actually see the gate from a hundred times a week. We listen for what the project really needs to do: privacy from a busy road, a statement piece for a heavily landscaped front yard, a quiet companion to a Spanish Revival or a Mid-Century original.

We translate all of that into elevation drawings and full 3D renderings you can hold up against your front elevation before we order a single board. Nothing goes into fabrication until you've signed off on the design.

Frames are joined with mortise and tenon — no exposed screws or face-mounted brackets holding the structure together. Stiles and rails are cut from quartersawn Sapele to fight cup and twist, and panels are book-matched where the grain calls for it.

The whole assembly is sized with seasonal movement in mind: a Bay Area gate goes through a 30°F swing and ~40% humidity change between July afternoons and February mornings, and we engineer the joinery so the gate still closes cleanly through every season. Every visible joint is dry-fit, marked, knocked apart, and reassembled with marine adhesive and stainless draw-bores.

We don't spec hardware to a price point — we spec it to last. Hinges are rated 1.5–2x your gate's actual swinging weight, fasteners are stainless or hot-dipped galvanized so they survive the salt-fog drift inland from the Bay, and locking hardware is chosen to match the entry door of the home — Emtek, Baldwin, Sun Valley, Rocky Mountain.

Automation, when you want it, uses LiftMaster and Viking operators. Underground hydraulics offer a clean look.

Bay Area soils are not friendly to gateposts. We auger to a minimum of 36 inches — deeper on hillside lots in Lafayette, Orinda, and the Oakland Hills — set engineered steel posts (not buried 4x4s) in fiber-reinforced concrete, slope the top of every footing for drainage, and pour collars above grade so water can't pool against the post.

On automated installs we trench properly for low-voltage and operator cabling, vault the photo-eyes flush, and tune the operator's force, slowdown, and obstruction sensitivity to UL 325 before we leave site.