What we do

About John Beedon

At the age of 10, John went to spend the summer with his Grandpa Bud—who had designed and built his own “modern” house in the early 1960s—on the shore of Lake Michigan. They spent the summer drawing floor plans and clearing fallen trees with a chainsaw after a huge lake-effect storm. John clearly remembers drawing the roofline and floor plan of Grandpa Bud’s home and his grandfather telling him, “You got it right.” Fourteen years later, when John helped Grandpa Bud move in with John’s parents, John’s grandfather gave him his tools.

By then, John had spent a summer pushing a broom for Lucian Lee Construction Company as Lee built John’s parents’ custom home on the outskirts of Norman, Oklahoma. John continued working with Lee during summers until he graduated from high school and started working for Lee full time. Lee was at the cutting-edge in Norman at that time on the residential building materials he used, such as laminated I beams and parallams. With Lee, John learned the basics of building a well-built home, that building is making the client’s ideas a reality, and that the process and materials for building are constantly evolving.

At the age of 24, John got a really good deal on a termite-ridden home in a historic area of Norman. With the advice and occasional assistance of his mentor Rick Lambert, John learned home restoration. In this house he built new beams and spent weeks in the crawl space with 20 ton jacks, shoring and leveling the home. He also personally restored the more than 25 double-hung wood sash windows, which involved cutting out the glass, stripping and sanding the sashes back to wood, priming, painting, resetting, and glazing each piece of original glass.

John then left Oklahoma and worked in construction in New Hampshire, Florida, and California. At 36, John returned to Oklahoma where he worked the next 12 years on projects as diverse as helping put a working cattle ranch in South Park, Colorado on the National Registry of Historic Places; helping implement the renovation of the SixTwelve community space in the Paseo District in Oklahoma City; and running a management and maintenance company for residential properties. John now spends much of his time on design and build projects for clients and on speculation.