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About Us
Hills & Harbour was founded to bring a design-first, transparent approach to residential building in Adelaide — without the trade-offs that usually come with either volume building or bespoke architecture alone.
Our Story
Hills & Harbour began with a simple observation: Adelaide homeowners were choosing between volume builders offering speed and certainty but little design input, or architectural practices offering design excellence with far less cost and schedule certainty. Few were offering both.
We built our studio to close that gap — an in-house design team working alongside our own construction and estimating teams from the first site visit, so design decisions are informed by buildability and cost from day one, not discovered as a surprise during documentation.
Today we work across custom homes, renovations, knockdown rebuilds, house and land packages and small residential developments throughout metropolitan Adelaide, the Adelaide Hills and the Fleurieu Coast.
What Guides Us
Every project is led by design intent, not a catalogue of standard inclusions. If a decision doesn't serve the brief, we say so.
The gap between what's drawn and what's built is where budgets blow out. We close that gap before construction starts.
Costs, timelines and trade-offs are explained plainly, including the ones that aren't in our commercial interest to raise.
Material and system choices are weighed against decades of Adelaide seasons, not just the day of handover photography.
The Studio
Every project is overseen by the same core team from first conversation to handover — no rotating point of contact.
Claire Bennett
Founding Director
Nathan Cole
Design Director
Elena Kovacs
Construction Manager
James Whitfield
Estimating & Contracts Manager
Priya Nair
Client Experience Lead