A handyman builds a shelf. Image generated by AI using Midjourney.

Though the home service industry is worth $500 billion, it remains a highly fragmented space occupied by a variety of players: independent contractors, platforms such as Angie, TaskRabbit, as well as white label concierge firms like LiveEasy.

Vishwas Prabhakara has a new twist to offer. Through a membership system, his startup Honey Homes provides its clients, the homeowners, with the services of a dedicated, salaried handyman. One of the goals of the company, Prabhakara told HousingWire, is to build a partnership between a homeowner and a handyperson based on “consistency and trust.”

The base price for the membership starts at $2,950 for an annual plan and $295 per month for a monthly plan. It provides a household with one dedicated handy person who is able to complete tasks around the house, such as caulking, grouting, patching, paint touch-ups, TV hanging, installations, furniture assembly as well as “minor electrical and plumbing jobs.” Jobs that require a licensed specialist are not covered by the monthly membership, the additional cost will have to be shouldered by the homeowners.

Prabhakara identified busy families as his company’s target audience. These families usually have providers for childcare, house cleaning as well as landscaping. But they rarely have a dedicated home maintenance professional, Prabhakara said.

“One of the big beliefs I have is that home maintenance, while really important, is actually not the thing that people want to buy,” Prabhakara told HousingWire. “They want to buy a better lifestyle. And with our handymen, this is what people are actually asking us to do. They want  to upgrade their home in all the areas that bring them comfort and joy.”

Honey Homes has full-time employees who receive healthcare, PTO, parental leave, as well as “ongoing professional development opportunities.” Founded in 2021, the startup matches homeowners and home maintenance professionals in the San Francisco Bay area as well as Dallas through their app.

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Over the next couple of years, Prabhakara hopes to expand his company to additional markets.

“Over the next couple years, we should be able to be in the top 20 metros across the country,” he said.

The Honey Homes roadmap

Over the summer, Honey Homes notched Series A funding to grow the company’s presence and improve its technology. It raised $9 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. DoorDash co-founders Tony Xu and Stanley Tang, Lyft co-founder Logan Green, Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu and Mercury co-founder Immad Akhund also invested in that round.

It has led to the company rolling out a new product, Home Health, which will provide new customers with a professional who will execute a “top-to-bottom” evaluation of a home’s major appliances, systems and fixtures. After that evaluation, the handyman will be able to come up with a customized, annual home maintenance plan, which he will execute.

Andrew Ladd, Honey Homes’ latest recruit and former senior director at DoorDash, will oversee all product development for the company.

Honey Homes doubled its customer base over the last three months to 1,000 members, the company said.

The post This startup desires you to radically reimagine the native handyman appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Though the home service industry is worth $500 billion, it remains a highly fragmented space occupied by a variety of players: independent contractors, platforms such as Angie, TaskRabbit, as well as white label concierge firms like LiveEasy.

Vishwas Prabhakara has a new twist to offer. Through a membership system, his startup Honey Homes provides its clients, the homeowners, with the services of a dedicated, salaried handyman. One of the goals of the company, Prabhakara told HousingWire, is to build a partnership between a homeowner and a handyperson based on “consistency and trust.”

The base price for the membership starts at $2,950 for an annual plan and $295 per month for a monthly plan. It provides a household with one dedicated handy person who is able to complete tasks around the house, such as caulking, grouting, patching, paint touch-ups, TV hanging, installations, furniture assembly as well as “minor electrical and plumbing jobs.” Jobs that require a licensed specialist are not covered by the monthly membership, the additional cost will have to be shouldered by the homeowners. 

Prabhakara identified busy families as his company’s target audience. These families usually have providers for childcare, house cleaning as well as landscaping. But they rarely have a dedicated home maintenance professional, Prabhakara said.

“One of the big beliefs I have is that home maintenance, while really important, is actually not the thing that people want to buy,” Prabhakara told HousingWire. “They want to buy a better lifestyle. And with our handymen, this is what people are actually asking us to do. They want  to upgrade their home in all the areas that bring them comfort and joy.”

Honey Homes has full-time employees who receive healthcare, PTO, parental leave, as well as “ongoing professional development opportunities.” Founded in 2021, the startup matches homeowners and home maintenance professionals in the San Francisco Bay area as well as Dallas through their app. 

Over the next couple of years, Prabhakara hopes to expand his company to additional markets.

“Over the next couple years, we should be able to be in the top 20 metros across the country,” he said.

The Honey Homes roadmap

Over the summer, Honey Homes notched Series A funding to grow the company’s presence and improve its technology. It raised $9 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. DoorDash co-founders Tony Xu and Stanley Tang, Lyft co-founder Logan Green, Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu and Mercury co-founder Immad Akhund also invested in that round.

It has led to the company rolling out a new product, Home Health, which will provide new customers with a professional who will execute a “top-to-bottom” evaluation of a home’s major appliances, systems and fixtures. After that evaluation, the handyman will be able to come up with a customized, annual home maintenance plan, which he will execute.

Andrew Ladd, Honey Homes’ latest recruit and former senior director at DoorDash, will oversee all product development for the company.

Honey Homes doubled its customer base over the last three months to 1,000 members, the company said.

The post This startup desires you to radically reimagine the native handyman appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. If houses came with a soundtrack, the groove for this historic San Francisco manse would surely be psychedelic. Radically reimagined by AD100 designer Nicole Hollis, the mind-bending abode pays tribute to the city’s progressive cultural legacy as well as the audacious tastes of Hollis’s clients. “It’s Grateful Dead meets Burning Man meets Marrakech meets Victorian posh, with a generous dose of contemporary design and art,” Hollis says, tracing the elaborate web of influences that converge in this hallucinatory vision of modern hippie-luxe. “I wanted to bring rock and roll into the life of the house, not just as an applied gloss but as part of its DNA,” she adds.

Less florid than San Francisco’s Victorian-era Painted Ladies, the Colonial Revival-style home was designed by architect Edward John Vogel and built in 1897. Its location in the storied Haight-Ashbury district placed the house at the rainbow-bright center of 1960s counterculture , the era when Gene Estribou, a previous homeowner, opened a recording studio on the dwelling’s attic level. The Grateful Dead laid down some of their earliest tracks there, as did Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Miller Band, and other mandarins of the San Francisco sound.

“The clients really pushed me to step out of my comfort zone and into their world,” says designer Nicole Hollis.

The kitchen is outfitted with a Martino Gamper table and chairs, vintage Moroccan pendants, a backsplash of zellige tiles, a Gaggenau oven, Waterworks fixtures, and a custom bronze hood.

Working with Richard Beard Architects, Hollis completely transformed the house, essentially demolishing the interiors and reinventing them with a greater sense of symmetry as well as accommodations for a contemporary kitchen and generous baths and closets. Beard also designed a trim modern addition to the back of the house for the new kitchen and family room on the main level, a bar and screening room below, and bedrooms on the floor above. “The primary façades—the front and one of the sides—were sacred, so that part of the program was more of a pure restoration,” Beard explains. “For the interior, we didn’t want to ape Colonial Revival or any other period style, but we tried to be sympathetic to the original structure in terms of proportions and materials. Nicole and the clients had already established a singular aesthetic for the house, and our job was to help fulfill the vision.”

“I wanted to bring rock and roll into the life of the house, not just as an applied gloss but as part of its DNA.”

That aesthetic was nothing short of sensational. Drawing on the combined talents of craftspeople from around the globe, Hollis and her team detailed the rooms with a staggering array of bespoke architectural details and decorative appliqués that nod to the clients’ obsession with rock and roll and hippie drug culture, their fascination with traditional Moroccan design, and their seemingly unquenchable thirst for dazzling color and pattern. Those passions found expression in plaster moldings carved with marijuana leaves and peace symbols; intricate trelliswork and grilles handmade in Morocco; a comprehensive program of custom bronze hardware, made by the Belgian company Van Cronenburg, which incorporates motifs of pot leaves, mushrooms, and hearts, interpreted in a redolent language of Eastlake style and the Aesthetic Movement; and a spectacular range of decorative painting and finishes executed by Los Angeles–based Londubh Studio, including glow-in-the-dark stenciling in the wife’s kaleidoscopic dressing room and images drawn from vintage acid tabs that appear in the decorative borders in the husband’s trippy office.

The post Step Inside a Radically Reimagined San Francisco Stunner Designed by Nicole Hollis | Architectural Digest appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors Raphael Mandelman and Dean Preston have proposed two different solutions to the housing and homelessness crisis that may force The City to get more involved in its thorniest policy question.

Preston is working to put an initiative on the November ballot that would penalize property owners who keep residential units vacant for six months or more. The goal of the proposed bill would be to disincentivize real estate speculation, push landlords to rent vacant units and, through penalties on unrented vacant units, raise money for homeless services. Naturally, Preston’s proposal is supported by many on The City’s progressive left.

Mandelman’s proposal focuses on a different aspect of the housing problem by requiring The City to provide shelter to homeless people — a policy known as “right to shelter.” New York City and Washington, DC already have similar policies that in some cases are stronger than what Mandelman has proposed. Right to shelter may seem like a radical idea, as it would force The City to commit to housing the homeless. But the law would only require San Francisco to provide shelter, not housing. Shelter includes residential hotels, homeless shelters, organized tent cities and tiny homes, but does not require The City to build more permanent housing.

Neither of these solutions are perfect and both have been criticized. Preston’s vacancy tax would not cover single family homes or duplexes, even though these types of buildings constitute a significant proportion of the vacant units in San Francisco. A broader vacancy tax would have a greater impact on the housing market, but would also run into opposition from smaller landlords and homeowners.

Mandelman’s policy of forcing The City to provide shelter to homeless people would also empower San Francisco to make it unlawful to sleep on the streets – and could be construed as criminalizing homelessness. If Mandelman’s proposal passes, it is likely there would be more incidents of police arresting or otherwise targeting homeless people. Some San Franciscans would probably see this as necessary, even good, while others would see it as a violation of the rights of homeless people and a form of harassment.

Yet based on what we have seen in other cities, obliging San Francisco to provide shelter could also further empower homeless people and their advocates, because they would be able to sue The City if sufficient shelter is not provided. During the pandemic, New York City was south because of inadequate WiFi in homeless shelters. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, supporting some homeless young people to continue their studies and expanding the notion of shelter.

Mandelman and Preston are coming at the same problem from different angles, but together they may make The City rethink its big picture approach to housing and homelessness.

Both of these proposals sample the relationship between housing and capital in San Francisco. Preston’s idea makes it tougher for wealthy investors to use residential buildings speculatively. Taxing vacant units does not make it illegal for landlords to profit off their investments, but forces them to lease empty units rather than waiting for property values ​​and rents to go up.

Housing in San Francisco is hardly unregulated. Rent control, limits on what can be built and other policies influence the housing market. But these policies keep the private sector at the center of housing. Both Preston and Mandelman’s proposals call for both regulating the market and bringing The City into housing policy in a bigger way.

An unquestioned assumption about housing — not just in San Francisco but throughout the US — is that creating and providing housing, except for the very poor, is the work of the private sector. This is not the case in most countries and perhaps San Francisco is now beginning to question this as well.

The problem with linking housing almost exclusively to the private sector is that market factors define the housing market — and in different ways, Preston and Mandelman are trying to address that.

Mandelman’s solution asks nothing of property owners, but forces The City to do more to find shelter for approximately 8,000 homeless people. His proposal implicitly recognizes the failure of the market to create housing for homeless and compels The City to provide some support for those living on the streets.

A peculiar pathology in American policy making is that we continue to be bedeviled by problems most of the world has solved. Gun violence and health care fall into this category, and so does housing. US policy does not dictate that housing is a right, or even a direct government issue, but rather the domain of markets and profits with some regulations and incentives.

Given the extent of homelessness in San Francisco and many American cities it is not a bad idea to start questioning that approach.

Lincoln Mitchell has written numerous books and articles on The City and the Giants. Visit lincolnmitchell.com or follow him on Twitter @LincolnMitchell

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