The Good Guys

By the same token, the company goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no mistake goes undetected or uncorrected. A mechanical engineer inspects each house after rough-in. “He’ll wander through the house for a couple of days,” Fritz says. In addition to spotting any mistakes, “he’ll photograph everything” before the walls are closed up. Before the architect’s final walk-through, an independent building inspector combs the building from top to bottom. “He’s got a mirror to check that the bottom of every door is painted, that there’s paint behind the hinges, that there’s paint on the tops of the doors. He’s going to look at the valve tags on the HVAC system and trace some of them back. You put another set of eyes on it.” And not just eyes, adds Fritz, who makes sure that every piece of equipment is thoroughly wrung out before the owners move in. “You put somebody in the shower,” he says. “You run the dishwashers 20 or 30 times—and you’ve got to put stuff in them. You buy a bunch of towels and do the laundry, see if the thing is bouncing around, check if all the packing bolts are out of it. You try to head off the problems, and then you tell the people, “Not if you have a problem, when you have a problem, call us, and we’ll be there in half an hour. It doesn’t matter if it’s 11:00 on Saturday night.”

That’s no empty promise. One Saturday night an owner called and, shouting over the din of a party, said that his plumbing was backing up into the basement (a landscaper had dug through the sewer line). Fritz didn’t call the plumber and go back to sleep; he sent out an all-points bulletin to his employees, who converged on the house from every direction. With the party in full swing upstairs, Horizon’s people dealt with the unpleasantness below while their plumbers mended the waste line. Then they stayed to disinfect the premises. “When something goes wrong, you have to be there,” Fritz says, “if it’s your responsibility, if it’s only partially your responsibility, or if it’s not your responsibility.”

Listed with the National Register of Historic Places, this Colonial-era house in southern Maryland called for an especially deft touch. Horizon repaired the brick-and-clapboard existing house, preserving its original features, and added a new wood-framed link and wing that match its historic character. Architect: Muse Architects, Bethesda, Md.; Photo: Robert C. Lautman. With that attitude—and the organizational horsepower to back it up—Bohm and Fritz don’t need a fancy, high-profile office to establish their credibility. Their clients know where to find them.