The Good Guys

And Fritz has taken his interest in building science beyond merely following industry best practices; he is actively involved in advancing the state of the art. “I’ve put [Horizon] together with Tremco and Dow, and they’ve developed some pretty intriguing liquid-applied membranes,” Lstiburek says. “They’ve developed a relationship with the product-development sides of some of these companies.” Wall-and-eave section mock-ups crowd a garage bay at the company’s building, where Fritz tests new products and building details before clearing them for use in Horizon projects. “It doesn’t sound like it’s sophisticated, but it is,” Lstiburek says of Fritz’s home laboratory. “It’s exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be done—and usually isn’t.” With feedback from Fritz’s garage-based testing and field experience, “Tremco has developed a whole new line of liquid-applied water control for punched openings and sheathing.”

All In Joe Bohm calls his partner “the best project manager east of the Mississippi.” And Bohm is in a position to know. He and Fritz met some 35 years ago, when Fritz was still driving his state police cruiser, and Bohm, a CPA, was the CFO of a large industrial company. Both were dabbling in construction at the time, so when their wives met in the neighborhood and later introduced them, the two men had a lot to talk about. Fritz had built his own house and moonlighted with small construction projects. Bohm had hired a contractor to build his family’s first house, flipped it for a profit, then repeated the process a couple of times. “I was building this kind of tax-free retirement plan,” Bohm says. But the routine was becoming stressful. “Either my career was going to wreck the building business or the building business was going to wreck my career.” Meanwhile, Fritz was having career issues of his own. Bohm remembers running into his friend after an especially hard day at work. “His uniform was covered with dirt and had grass all over it,” Bohm says. During a traffic stop, a man had pulled a knife, and Fritz ended up wrestling him for it on the median strip. “I said, ‘George, we’ve got to do something.’”

This suburban Washington, D.C., house, completed in 1995, wasn’t Horizon’s first significant project. But its prominent location, high-profile owners, and distinguished architect lent credibility that would serve the company well in the years to come. Horizon has since amended the original building with a sun porch enclosure, a pool with a yachtlike pool house, and a number of smaller projects. Architect: Hartman–Cox Architects, Washington, D.C.; Photo: Celia Pearson. What they did was found Horizon, which began as a design/build partnership. “The whole idea was to have a marketing hook,” Bohm says. “We wanted to do high-quality work with beautiful designs.” The problem was, clients at the mid-market level that matched the young company’s expertise were less design-oriented than their builders. “We found that we were always working against the Brand X competitors,” Bohm says. Still, he adds, “We were doing OK with that. We weren’t making gobs of money,” but they were making a living, gaining experience, and working their way up to more elaborate and challenging projects.

The turning point came with a referral to a young Washington, D.C., architect named Stephen Muse. Muse had a commission to design a significant house in Annapolis, Md., but he didn’t know any builders in the area. Horizon took the project, aced it, and earned a lifelong friend in the architect. Soon Muse, whose star was on the rise, was feeding Horizon a steady stream of work in and around Washington, where high-end custom building was beginning an unprecedented boom. “There was no plan for that,” Bohm says. “It just sort of happened.”

The Washington market proved the optimal environment for Horizon’s development, as Muse and a close-knit fraternity of the area’s top residential architects provided a progression of ever larger, more complex, and more demanding projects. Muse estimates that Horizon has built 75 of his firm’s projects over the past 25 years. “I don’t think there’s been a period in the office when they weren’t doing one of our projects,” he says. More telling than the number, though, are the projects for which Muse will recommend Horizon and no other builder. Those, Muse says, “are the projects—and we’ve been doing a number of these recently—that are just so complicated. They coordinate that stuff exceptionally well. In January, they’re not thinking about January; they’re thinking about June.” One of Muse’s recent projects, an addition/renovation job on a substantial in-town house, fairly cried out for that kind of management. The work included dropping the existing basement by several feet, to allow for a large home theater, and digging a new sub-basement level below that for a home fitness center with an indoor squash court. The latter required excavating some 40 feet below grade, directly beneath the existing masonry structure, and driving helical piers an additional 80 feet into the earth. “It was like building a very big version of a Rubik’s Cube,” Muse explains.