Latest / ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard / Why Saratoga California Builds ADUs To Last | ADU Adventures EP020

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Why Saratoga California Builds ADUs To Last | ADU Adventures EP020 · ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard

• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and today we're headed to another Bay Area City.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: For the last several episodes, we've been down in Southern California, San Marino, the San Gabriel Valley, Arcadia, Rosemead.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: We even made it all the way to the end of Route sixty six in Santa Monica and back up again along the El Camino Real, all the way to Cupertino, California, and I've loved every mile of it.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: But today we're headed into the Bay Area again, back in Silicon Valley, and we're visiting a city that sits about as close to Acton ADU's own backyard as you can get.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Saratoga, California.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you've driven it, you know the feeling.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: You come off Highway eighty five, the road narrows, the trees get older, the lots get bigger, and somewhere around Saratoga Village, the whole pace of the valley just seems to slow down.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Saratoga sits right up against the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it feels less like a suburb and more like a small town that Silicon Valley grew up around and somehow never swallowed up.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's actually the story I want to tell today.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because Saratoga, California is not a city that got lucky.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a city that made a decision over and over again for more than a century.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The decision to keep what matters.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: They kept an orchard when everyone else was paving over them.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: They kept a festival that started in the year nineteen hundred.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: They kept a senator's villa, a winemaker's mountain, and a century old Japanese garden.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: They kept a village, a pace of life, and a connection to the land that the rest of the valley traded away decades ago.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where I'm going with this.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: An ADU is that exact same decision.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Made at the scale of one family at a time on one piece of land at a time.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's you, deciding that your parents, your kids, your home, your roots are worth keeping close.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So today a few things.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: First, the history, because Saratoga has one of the best origin stories in California.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the places, because you can't understand why homeowners fall in love with the city until you've walked its hillsides.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Third, what building here actually looks like today, with real sourced numbers and the three very different ways you could go about it.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, a little reflection on orchards, and why the best things we build are the ones we plant for someone else.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive in.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Valley of the Heart's Delight.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Saratoga's recorded history starts early, and it moves fast.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: According to the California Office of Historic Preservation, the Anza Exploring Party passed through the Saratoga area on march twenty fifth, seventeen seventy six.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lumbering in the mountains began in eighteen forty seven, and it brought the area's first settlers in eighteen fifty.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Then came the industries, one after another, a lime quarry in the eighteen fifties, a grist mill in eighteen fifty four, a tannery in eighteen sixty three, a paper mill in eighteen sixty eight.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Saratoga starts as a working town, saw blades and millstones, hands and timber.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Then it becomes something else entirely, a destination.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: The state historic record tells us that Pacific Congress Springs, a resort built around the area's mineral springs, operated from eighteen sixty six all the way up to nineteen forty two.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually where the name comes from.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: The springs reminded people of Saratoga Springs, New York, so the name crossed the country and stuck.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then comes my favorite chapter, The Orchards.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: By the early twentieth century, this whole valley, the Santa Clara Valley, was covered in fruit trees.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Prunes, apricots, cherries, they called it the Valley of Heart's Delight.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And every spring when the blossoms came in, the hills around Saratoga turned white and pink for miles.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was so beautiful that people traveled to see it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: The California Office of Historic Preservation records that local farmers held the first blossom festival in 1900, after the end of a drought as a celebration of gratitude.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And according to the Local History Project for the Love of Apricots, that festival grew so popular it drew visitors from around the world until it ended with World War II.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now you know what happened next, because it happened everywhere around here.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: The orchards came down, the subdivisions went up, the world's most productive fruit region became the world's most productive tech region, and almost nothing of the Old Valley survived.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Almost.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's where Saratoga does the thing that makes it so Saratoga.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: In 1972, according to the city's own heritage orchard master plan, Saratoga purchased land on Fruit Vale Avenue, and instead of developing all of it, the city preserved a working orchard.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not a plaque, not a mural of trees, an actual living fruit bearing orchard right next to the library.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Protected under the open space element of the city's general plan, it's still there.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can walk it today, and it's very pretty.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the festival came back too.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: For the love of apricots documents that the Saratoga Historical Foundation revived the Blossom Festival in 2013, and it now runs every spring at the Heritage Orchard and the Civic Center.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And one more detail, and this is the one that gets me.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: That same source tells us the Novakovich family has farmed their orchard on Fruitvale Avenue for nearly 125 years.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: You heard that right.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: One family, one piece of land, five generations of hands in the same soil, in the middle of one of the most expensive real estate markets on earth.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now think about the number of times over a hundred and twenty five years that selling would have been the obvious move, the easy move.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And think about what it took generation after generation to decide instead this is worth keeping.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not nostalgia, that's a philosophy.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's built into the bones of the city.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So hold on to that idea, because it turns out the orchard wasn't the first time Saratoga made this decision.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't even the second.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Why homeowners never leave?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let me answer a more personal question now.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you own a home in Saratoga or you've ever wondered why homes here hold their value the way they do, this is the real answer.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why do people love living here?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a remarkable historical reason.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: For more than a century, whenever someone in Northern California had the means to build a dream retreat absolutely anywhere, an astonishing number of them looked at the whole map and chose the hills of Saratoga.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then one by one, Saratoga kept those retreats and opened them to everyone.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Walk it with me.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: In eighteen ninety, as the city of Saratoga's own history tells it, the winemaker Paul Massan opened his mountain winery here, planting French champagne grapes in these hillsides.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Today, that old winery above town is one of the most beloved concert menus in all of the Bay Area.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: According to the CLIO Historical Survey of Saratoga, it has been hosting live shows since 1958.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Summer night, hillside amphitheater, vineyards below you, music in the air.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's a Tuesday in Saratoga, and honestly, it's one of my favorite places to visit.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: In 1912, United States Senator James Phelan, who had also been a three-term mayor of San Francisco, built his grand estate here, Via Montalvo, and Santa Clara County Parks describes what it became after his death.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: A hundred and sixty six acre public park with formal gardens and peaceful trails, home of the Montalvo Arts Center, galleries, artist residences, concerts on the Great Lawn, a senator's private paradise now open to anyone with an afternoon free.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1915, San Francisco philanthropists Isabel and Oliver Stein walked through the Japanese pavilion at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and fell in love.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: According to the National Park Service, they built Hakone into the Saratoga Hills that same year.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Eighteen acres of koi ponds, moon bridges, and bamboo, the oldest Japanese style country villa in the Western Hemisphere.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's still there.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can walk it any day of the week.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very beautiful.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the Hakone detail that belongs in this episode.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: By 1966, according to the Hakone Foundation's own history, the private partnership that owned the estate decided they couldn't keep it any longer.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: They could have sold the developers, subdivided, cashed out in a market that was already roaring.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they refused to let that happen, and they offered Hakone for sale to exactly one buyer, the city of Saratoga.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the city bought it as a park for everyone.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's six years before the city bought the heritage orchard.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are you seeing the pattern?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: The city keeps things.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: So when you ask a homeowner why they love Saratoga, the honest answer is that ordinary life here includes things other people plan vacations around, a morning walk in a century old Japanese garden, an evening concert at a winery in the hills, an art opening at a senator's villa, dinner in the village on Big Basin Way with the Santa Cruz Mountains, starting at the end of the street, and then home to a big lot, mature trees, and precious quiet.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Silicon Valley is twenty minutes away.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: It just politely stops at the city line.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that is exactly why the ADU conversation in Saratoga is so different.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody moves here for a starter home.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: People move here for the last home, the one they never intend to leave.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the question a Saratoga family asks is never how do we trade up or out?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's we already found the place.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now how does everyone we love get to stay?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let's answer that.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: What keeping looks like today?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's talk about Saratoga right now in 2026.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And as per usual with the show, every number I give you has a source, but it may not always be perfect, so bear with me.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's first start with the people, though.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: According to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey via Census Reporter, the median age in Saratoga is 51.7 years.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now compare that to San Jose Metro as a whole, where the median age is about 38.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's a 13-year gap.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it tells you something important.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Saratoga is a city of people who arrived, put down roots, raised their families, and stayed.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: These are long tenure homeowners.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them are now thinking hard about the next chapter, aging in place, helping adult children who cannot touch this market on their own, and caring for their own parents.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to the market itself.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Data USA, drawing on the census figures, puts the median property value in Saratoga at around$2 million, with a home ownership rate of 86.4%.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Census Reporter shows the median household income at the Census Bureau's reporting cap, which means the true median is somewhere above$250,000 a year.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the Saratoga situation in one sentence.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Enormous value locked in the land, families who have no intention of leaving, and a next generation that can't buy a house next door.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Does that sound familiar?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's the exact problem family integrity planning was built for.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: The question is never should we cash out.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: The question is how do we keep the people we love close to the value we've already built?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Saratoga's land answers that question better than almost anywhere in the Bay Area.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is a city defined by large lots and semi-rural character, where most of the Silicon Valley fights for every square foot, many Saratoga properties have room to spare.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: The constraint usually isn't space, it's judgment.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hillside terrain, mature trees, and a city that cares deeply about how things look.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what are the rules?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Acton ADU publishes a few regulations guides, but they're always changing.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Most single family lots in Saratoga can add one detached ADU plus a junior ADU.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Detached ADUs can be up to 1200 square feet, and a junior ADU lives within the walls of the existing home and tops out around 500 square feet.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Saratoga asks that a new ADU be consistent with the primary home and materials, color, and architectural style.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, these are things that don't actually trend against what most people want.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to pause on the last one, because some people hear design consistency requirement and groan.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: I hear it and I think, good.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is a city saying the same thing as said in 1972 with the orchard.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: New things should belong here.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you're going to add a building to a Saratoga property, it should look like it grew there, just like a tree.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're wondering whether the city can slow walk you, know this.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: ADU approvals in California are ministerial, on a state mandated clock, and the State Department of Housing and Community Development actively reviews Saratoga's orintas for compliance.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: HCD's most recent technical review letter to the city went out December 2025.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: The state is watching and the rules favor the homeowner.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: One team, one piece of land.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Before I make this concrete with a family, I want to come back to design consistency rules because it points at something I have deliberately never talked about on the show, not once.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you listen to our episode about Cupertino, you may have noticed I never said the word prefab.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was on purpose.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And Saratoga of all cities we've covered is finally the right place to explain why.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are really three ways to put a second home on your land.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in a city that asks new buildings to look like they belong, the difference between them is the whole ball game.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the cheap way, the beige box, the lowest bid, generic unit, the same rectangle a contractor drops on every lot in every town.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: In a lot of places, that's fine.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: But on a Saratoga hillside, next to mature oaks, beside a home with real character, in a city that will ask how it fits, the beige box doesn't quite belong.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone who looks at it it reads a little cheap the day it's finished and cheaper every year after that.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: The second option is prefab, and I want to be fair here because prefab is a legitimate option with real strengths.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's built in a factory so it can be done fast, and the factory conditions are controlled.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: On a flat, open, and straightforward lot, when speed is a priority, it can genuinely make sense.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the Saratoga sized catch.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: A prefab unit is designed in a factory for nobody's land in particular.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: It arrives as a finished box, and your site has to take it as is.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, put that on the terrain we've been talking about all episode, slopes, heritage trees, tight access, and a design review that wants your materials and colors and roof lines to match the main house.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: A box designed in a warehouse 200 miles away, or even in some cases 3,000 miles away, doesn't know your oak tree is there.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: It can't answer to your slope.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: It can't match the house you already love.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And craning it in on a wooded hillside or in an older neighborhood with telephone wires is its own adventure, if it's even possible at all.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the third way, the one that Acton ADU does.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's design build.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you exactly what that word means.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because it gets thrown around.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Design build means one team owns the whole thing, start to finish.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Design and construction.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Under one roof accountable to you.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Done right, you are not the general contractor for your own backyard.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're not the one calling the architect, then chasing a separate builder, then standing in line at the city, then refereeing when the architect blames the builder and the builder blames the plans.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: All of that coordination, the architect, the contractor, the engineer, the city, the permits, the inspections, is the job.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in a design build model, it's our job, not yours.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: That matters everywhere.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: In Saratoga, it matters double, because this is a city of hillside rules, heritage trees, and a design review board that genuinely cares.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: You want one team that has walked these hills before, that knows what the city will ask before it asks, and that designs the unit for your lot, your slope, your trees, and your home, so that when it's finished, it looks like it grew up there.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a whole difference in one breadth.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: A beige box ignores the land, a prefab is finished before it meets the land, and a design build starts with the land and never leaves it.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that finally is why I stayed quiet about prefab until now.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can't really see why a design builder builds the way they do until you're standing in a place like this one.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: A place that decided a long time ago that the things you add should belong.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let me show you what it looks like for one family.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, this is a composite drawn from real patterns, of course, from the homeowners that we meet and know and work with, but the details are changed.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's call them the Liang's.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Liangs bought in Saratoga in the early 1990s.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: They raised two kids there, dad is 74, mom is 71, and they rattle around a house that was designed for a family of five.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Their daughter and her husband both work in the valley, and even with two incomes, buying anywhere near her parents is entirely out of reach.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: The old playbook says parents downsize, sell, move somewhere cheaper, and family scatters.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: The daughter visits on holidays, everyone loses something.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Saratoga playbook, the Orchard Playbook, says something different.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: The value is already there.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the family builds a single story ADU designed for aging in place, no steps, wide doorways, a walk-in shower with a bench.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: The parents move into the ADU, the daughter's family moves into the main house.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody sells, nobody scatters, the parents live better in a home built around how they actually move through the day.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: The property works harder for the family than it ever has in the past, as one big house with two people in it, and the land does what Saratoga land has always done for the families, patient enough to keep it.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: It grows in value for the generation living there now and the one after that.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a transaction.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's a transition.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the difference between treating your property as an asset that you eventually liquidate and treating it like it's an orchard that you tend.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're planting trees you won't ever harvest.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: I want to close the loop on those orchards.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: An orchardist who planted apricot trees in Saratoga in 1900 wasn't planting for that year.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Fruit trees take years to come into full bearing.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: You plant them knowing that the best harvests belong to a version of your family you may never meet.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: That is a strange and beautiful kind of optimism.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: You put your hands in the dirt for someone else.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's why the Heritage Orchard moves me the way it does.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't just a park.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's proof that a whole community can think that way.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: In 1972, with land values already climbing, Saratoga looked at those trees and decided the harvest wasn't just fruit.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was their identity, continuity.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was a promise to people who hadn't been born yet.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, the city had already done this once, six years earlier, when it bought the Hakone Garden to keep it out of a developer's hands.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Novakovich family made the same decision privately for 125 years running.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And every family that builds an ADU for their parents or holds a door open for their kids is making it too.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because let's be honest about what you're really doing when you build in your backyard.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to personally use every year of that building's life.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: A well-built ADU will outlast the reason you build it.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: The home you build for your mother becomes the home your son starts his family in, becomes the place you yourself land when the big house gets too big.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: You are planting a tree.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: At Acton ADU there's a line we hold ourselves to build for the next thirty years, not for the next thirty days.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Stan Acton, our founder, learned his craft from people who thought that way, and it's why our team sweats details nobody will notice until year 15.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Saratoga gets this, and it might get this better than a lot of cities do.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: A place that kept its orchard understands in its bones that the things worth building are the things worth keeping.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're sitting on a Saratoga lot right now, with parents getting older or kids getting priced out, I'd just gently offer you this thought.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're not being asked to change your property.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're being asked to tend it.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's Saratoga, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: The springs, the blossoms, the gardens, and villas and hillside vineyards, the orchard that refused to disappear, and the families quietly writing the next chapter of a very old story.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for spending the time with me today.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for caring about your family's future enough to think this far ahead.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole spirit of this show, and honestly, it's the whole spirit of this city.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: If today got you thinking about your own backyard, Acton ADU is here to help.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: We've been building in the Bay Area for over thirty five years, and Saratoga is home territory for us.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: We know the hillsides, we know the design standards, and we know how to build something that belongs on your land and lasts for the people you love.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: We don't just build ADUs, we do it all, and we build homes that last, and legacies that stay in the family.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Visit us at actinadu.com or call four oh eight five three nine one nine oh eight for a free consultation anywhere in California.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's no pressure, just an honest conversation about what's actually possible on your property.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, this has been ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Here's to tomorrow.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's all go plant something.