The builder
Graham Kilgour.
Founder of Haddon Homes. He buys the tired house on the good street and turns it into homes the street is glad got built.
The short version
He is the one who answers the email.
Graham started Haddon Homes to build the housing Hamilton is short of and almost nobody takes on: the middle. Bigger than a single house, smaller than a tower. Duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and houses that quietly hold more than one family.
He has lived here since 2008. Hamilton is not a market he picked off a spreadsheet, it is the place his whole story happens. That shows up as a kind of fluency you cannot buy: which streets can hold another family, which approval path is real and which one is a dead end, and which line in the bylaw is about to move.
Haddon is deliberately small and deliberately in-house. Graham underwrites the lot, carries it through approvals, hires the trades, and holds the schedule. When something slips there is no general contractor to point at. There is him, and he answers.
The record
The part you can check.
Six projects sit on the board right now. One is finished with a family already living in it. One is twelve and a half acres still doing its homework. The rest sit somewhere between those two. They are all on the site, with real photography where the work is real and a labelled concept where it is not yet.
Haddon Homes is an HCRA licensed builder and a City of Hamilton licensed contractor, and it carries a project from the first offer through to lease-up.
- In Hamilton since
- 2008
- Projects on the board
- Six
- Licensed
- HCRA builder, licence B60826
- At the table
- WE HBA missing middle and infill subcommittee
How he works
Four things that do not move.
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He earns the design before he draws it.
Walk the street. Talk to the people on it. Study the rhythm of the block and find the gap, which is to say who actually needs to live here and what this corner of the city is short of. The homework tells him what to build. Then he builds exactly that.
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Conservative numbers, or it is a no.
A project has to work on real assumptions, not on the market lifting it. He would rather walk away from a deal early than talk himself into one. That is an honesty stance before it is a competitive one, and it is why the projects that do start, finish.
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One team owns the outcome.
Haddon underwrites the lot, takes it through approvals, hires the trades, and runs the schedule day to day. Every handoff between companies is a place for cost and blame to hide, so he took the handoffs out. There is one name on the result.
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He shows the messy middle.
Most builders show you a finished render and nothing else. Haddon posts the drywall dust, the delays, the parts that are hard. A record you can check is worth more than a photograph you cannot.
What he argues for
Four should be six.
Hamilton lets a lot hold four homes. On most of the streets Graham works, six house-scale homes would fit and belong, and the city needs them. So he says so, in front of committees, on panels, and in writing, whether or not it is convenient for a project of his.
This is the part of the job that does not pay. He does it because a builder who only argues for his own file is a lobbyist, and a builder who argues for the street is a neighbour.
4 → 6
Where four homes fit on a lot today, six gentle, house-scale homes should be able to belong. It is a small change in the rules and a large change in how many people get to live here.
Who else you will meet
Small on purpose.
Interiors and material selection run in-house through Felicia Bartolotta and her design studio, which is why the finishes in a Haddon home are chosen rather than defaulted.
The rest is a small crew and a set of trades Graham has worked with for years, plus the planners, engineers, and counsel a given project actually needs. Nobody is on the payroll to make the company look bigger than it is.
If you have a site, a project, or a question about building here, write to him.
Graham Kilgour
Founder, Haddon Homes
info@haddonhomes.ca · Hamilton, Ontario