About Us

Santa Monica Decks

Santa Monica Decks is a licensed California contractor working out of a shop on 9th Street in Santa Monica. We design and build custom decks for Westside homes, we repair and refinish the ones already there, and we build the railings, stairs, pergolas and patio covers that go with them. We have been doing it here since 2006.

How Long We Have Been Doing This

We started in 2006 with one truck, a compound saw and a list of Mar Vista back gardens that all had the same problem: a back door four feet above a sloping yard and a set of concrete steps nobody enjoyed using. What began as a handful of small stepped decks is now custom deck design, construction and refinishing across the Westside. Two things changed the work along the way. Outdoor space stopped being an afterthought and became the room people spend the most time in, and the code caught up with what had been built in the decades before, which turned a lot of our calls into repairs of things that should never have passed. Today the work splits roughly evenly between new builds, hillside and elevated structures, and keeping existing decks alive.

The Story Behind The Company

The company exists because of a deck in Venice that came away from the house. It had been built by somebody in a hurry, the ledger was screwed straight through stucco with no flashing, and for eleven years nothing at all appeared to be wrong. Then a wet winter finished a job that had been quietly under way since the day it went up. Nobody was hurt, which was luck rather than design. We built this business around the parts of the job that nobody inspects, because those are the parts that decide whether a deck is safe in year eleven.

The Crew

Our carpenters are employees rather than subcontractors, most of them have been here for years, and one lead carpenter runs your job from the first footing to the final walk. Between them they have framed canyon decks on drilled piers in the Palisades, rebuilt duplex balconies in West LA, cut ipe until the blades gave up in Beverly Hills and carried material down Venice walk streets that no truck will ever reach. Everybody who answers the phone has been on the tools, which is why you get a straight answer about whether your ledger can take a deck rather than a promise that it can.

The Brands And Materials We Work With

We build in western red cedar, redwood, pressure treated pine, ipe and other dense tropical hardwoods, and in capped composite and cellular PVC from Trex, TimberTech and AZEK. Being material-agnostic matters because it lets the recommendation follow the job: redwood or cedar where the look of real timber is the point, composite or PVC on Pool Decks and anywhere near the water, ipe where the budget allows the longest-lived surface there is. The same applies overhead, where Pergolas and Patio Covers get built in cedar, redwood, powder-coated aluminium or insulated panel depending on what the space actually needs, and to the guards under Deck Railing in timber, cable or structural glass.

Why We Like The Work

Building outdoors is one of the few kinds of construction where the client uses the result every day and can see every joint. There is nowhere to hide a bad cut and no drywall going over it afterwards, which suits us. There is also real variety in it: a scaled drawing for a Culver City back garden on Monday, drilled piers on a Palisades slope on Wednesday, and sanding a twenty-year-old redwood deck back to fresh colour in West LA on Friday. Watching a grey, splintered surface come back to life under a sander is more satisfying than it has any right to be.

If you have a yard you cannot use, a deck you no longer trust, or a drawing you want a straight price on, tell us what the space has to do and we will tell you honestly what it takes. Call: (310) 564-8939