Alik Konovalenko

Energize Builders takes on custom homes and the sites that make them hard.

In Los Angeles that usually means a hillside: a steep lot, soil that has to be tested before anything is designed, caissons drilled deep to carry the structure, retaining walls, and a street too narrow for the trucks. Hillside work punishes shortcuts. A mistake in the ground is paid for in everything built on top of it.

I started building here in 2016, and my team has more than 20 years of Los Angeles construction behind it. The company is owner-led. I am the person accountable from the first call to the final walk-through.

I build what architects and designers draw. They own the design, the drawings and the material choices. My job is to build it correctly, coordinate the trades, and say early when something will not work on site.

See the work at energizebuilders.com

Builders see what owners never do.

After enough years of opening walls, I kept finding the same things: mold behind new finishes, rooms with no fresh air, water nobody tested, materials nobody questioned. A house can look expensive and still be a poor place to sleep, breathe and recover.

So I founded Energize Wellness Builders. We build new homes and retrofit existing ones around what your body is exposed to all day and all night: air, water, light, materials, moisture and sound.

Build the home your body wants to live in.

A lot of what is sold as wellness is hope with a price tag.

My rule is to separate three things, and to tell you which is which before you spend money.

• ProvenVentilation, filtration and moisture control. These rest on established building science.
• PromisingNewer ideas that are still being studied. Worth knowing about, and worth being honest about.
• HypeClaims with nothing behind them. I say so.

Born and raised in Israel. In Los Angeles since 2012.

Construction was not my first work in America. I came to it by choice and have been building ever since. I speak English, Hebrew and Russian.