How Ellery ADU Studio West Hollywood Was Born in West Hollywood
We opened this branch in 2015, the same year California’s ADU law changed and the permitting queue became the actual product. Nadia Ellery had spent the previous years watching homeowners in West Hollywood get ground down by a broken system. The moment that stuck with her happened right here, in a bungalow court off Fairfax. A homeowner had hired a designer for the plans, then a separate contractor for the build. The designer blamed the contractor for missing a setback. The contractor blamed the designer for the foundation detail. The homeowner was twelve months in, $40,000 over the original guess, and sleeping in their living room while the garage sat half-framed.
Nadia walked that job site with the homeowner. She saw the plywood subfloor warping from rain because the roofer and the framer were waiting on each other. She made a decision standing in that muddy backyard. West Hollywood needed a studio that handled drawings, permits, and construction under one contract with one flat price. No finger-pointing. No scope creep. That is what we built here.
Nadia Ellery’s Personal Connection to the ADU Trade
Nadia did not start in ADUs. She started in architecture school, then left because the buildings she was drawing were not the buildings people actually needed. She took a job with a design-build firm in Los Angeles and spent her first years in the field, not at a desk. She remembers the smell of fresh lumber in the morning, the particular grit of cured concrete on her palms, the sound of a nail gun echoing off canyon walls in Studio City. Those sensory details never left her.
The work that changed everything was a garage conversion in Sherman Oaks, 2013. The homeowner was a teacher in her sixties who needed rental income to stay in her house. The existing contractor had walked off the job after hitting bedrock the plans did not account for. Nadia spent three weeks redesigning the foundation, re-permitting through LADBS, and managing the crew herself. She ate lunch on the client’s porch every day, and they talked about the teacher’s late husband, his tools still hanging in the garage she was losing. When the ADU was finished, the teacher hugged her in the driveway and said, “You gave me my house back.”
That is what gets Nadia out of bed. Not the square footage. The person living in it. She has been at this for over ten years now, and if she were not doing ADUs, she would be building furniture in a small shop somewhere, working with her hands, solving spatial problems one at a time. The ADU trade lets her do that at a scale that matters to whole families.
Meet Nadia Ellery - The Person Behind Every Job
Nadia Ellery is Owner and Founder of Ellery ADU Studio West Hollywood. She holds a California contractor license and has completed the design-build permit process from West Hollywood to Van Nuys more times than she can count without checking her files. She trained under a tradesman who taught her to measure twice, photograph everything, and never promise a date she could not keep.
What separates Nadia from a corporate franchise technician is simple: she signs her name to every contract, and she answers her own callbacks. On weekends, she restores mid-century furniture she finds at estate sales in Culver City and Burbank. That patience with grain and joinery shows up in how she details an ADU’s trim package. Her commitment to you is direct: every job gets her personal attention from first site visit to final inspection.
Before
AfterOur Promise to West Hollywood Homeowners
Our values are not posters on a wall. They are policies we have paid to enforce.
Honest pricing. We learned this the hard way. In our first year, a supplier in North Hollywood quoted us wrong on James Hardie siding. We absorbed the difference rather than pass it to the homeowner. Now every quote carries a written line-item breakdown, and Clause 1 of our Haven Standard locks the price before anyone picks up a hammer.
Quality parts. We specify Tuff Shed for certain structural components and Abodu or Cover for prefab integrations where they fit the lot. We do not substitute without written approval. A homeowner in Santa Monica once caught a competitor swapping specified materials mid-job. That does not happen here because we photograph every delivery.
Standing behind every job. Our workmanship warranty is in writing, with a clear process for claims. We have eaten the cost of our own mistakes, and we have fixed errors made by previous contractors we were called in to rescue. The policy is: we finish what we start, documented.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed contractor - required by California law for any ADU construction over $500
- Insured & bonded - protecting your property and our crews throughout the build
- Years of local experience - serving West Hollywood and surrounding communities since 2015
- Strong local reputation - built project by project, review by review, callback by callback
Each credential matters because an ADU is a six-figure project inside your property line. State licensing means someone has verified our technical competence. Insurance means if a wall opens up and reveals something unexpected, you are not left holding the risk. Local experience means we know how West Hollywood’s Planning Division interprets setback rules differently than Los Angeles or Santa Monica. And reputation is the only credential we cannot buy; we have to earn it on your job.
Rooted in West Hollywood
We are not a truck that drives through. Nadia lives in this service area. She has waited in line at the same West Hollywood Post Office you use, eaten at the same Fairfax delis, sat in the same LADBS permit queue on Marsh Street. We have built ADUs in the Norma Triangle, up in the Hollywood Hills West, and along the bungalow courts near Beverly Boulevard. This branch is independently owned and operated, and the standards we work to come from Ellery ADU Studio. The neighbors we serve are ours.
Written by Nadia Ellery, Owner at Ellery ADU Studio West Hollywood, serving West Hollywood since 2015.