How Ellery ADU Studio Simi Valley Was Born in Simi Valley
It was a Tuesday morning in 2015, and we were standing in a driveway on Cochran Street, watching a homeowner flip through three different sets of plans that didn’t match each other. The architect’s drawings showed a 480-square-foot unit. The builder’s bid was based on 520 square feet. The permit application, still pending after eight months, listed 460. The homeowner had paid deposits to two different companies and still couldn’t break ground. That was the moment.
California’s ADU law had just changed, and Simi Valley’s permitting queue was already backing up into spring of the following year. Every contractor we’d met was treating the permit like someone else’s problem, and every designer was treating the build like a distant rumor. We called the homeowner later that week and offered something simple: one contract, one price, one person accountable for both the drawings and the finished unit. That became our first job under the Ellery name in Simi Valley, and it taught us everything. The ADU projects that fail aren’t the ones with bad materials or lazy crews. They’re the ones where the designer and builder each have someone else to blame.
We promised we’d never do that to a homeowner. Haven Standard, Clause 1: have it in writing before anyone starts.
Nadia Ellery’s Personal Connection to the ADU Trade
We didn’t come to this work through a business plan. We came to it through a garage in Moorpark, summer of 2009, where a tradesman who trained us was converting a detached structure into a livable space for his mother-in-law. The air smelled of fresh Douglas fir and wet concrete. The sawdust stuck to our arms in the heat. What struck us wasn’t the construction, it was the arithmetic: every decision about where a window went or how a roof drained determined whether this woman would be comfortable in her final years, or whether the family would spend the next decade fighting leaks and permit violations.
That tradesman taught us to read a joist like a sentence, to understand what it was saying about load and time and the person who installed it. He also taught us that most contractors never learn to read plans, and most architects never watch their drawings get built. The gap between those two worlds is where homeowners lose money, time, and trust.
We’ve spent the years since then living in that gap. Not bridging it, eliminating it. An ADU is a year-long relationship and a six-figure decision. People want to know whose practice it is. They want to know that when they text at 7 p.m. because the inspector flagged a shear wall detail, the person who answers understands both the structural engineering and the permit correction process, because they’ve done both.
What gets us out of bed is the documentation. The photo of the actual condition we found. The written note explaining why we deviated from the drawing by three inches to avoid a sewer line. The homeowner who understands what they paid for because they can see it. If we weren’t doing this, we’d probably be teaching somewhere, or restoring old houses nobody wants anymore. The through-line is the same: making something legible that someone else made obscure.
Meet Nadia Ellery - The Person Behind Every Job
Nadia Ellery, Owner and Founder of Ellery ADU Studio Simi Valley. Trained in design-build project management with direct experience across the full ADU lifecycle: feasibility study, permit set, construction documents, build coordination, final inspection, and certificate of occupancy.
What separates Nadia from a corporate franchise technician is simple: she’s the one who reviews your permit set before it submits, and she’s the one who walks the final inspection with you. There’s no regional manager between her and your job. She keeps a field notebook in her truck, the kind with graph paper, and writes down actual measurements from every site visit. She also grows tomatoes in raised beds behind her house in Simi Valley, and she’ll tell you that an ADU foundation and a good tomato bed have the same requirement: start with an honest assessment of what’s actually in the ground.
Her commitment to every homeowner is direct: you’ll know the price before we start, you’ll see what we found, and you’ll have it in writing.
Our Promise to Simi Valley Homeowners
Honest pricing, named on the page. We publish price ranges because Clause 1 of the Haven Standard requires a written, flat price before anyone starts. In 2019, a homeowner in West Hills called us after another company added $34,000 in “unforeseen conditions” mid-project. We don’t do that. We investigate before we quote, and we quote what we find.
Quality materials, documented. Every job leaves a photo record and a written report of what we actually installed. If we specified Cover wall panels, Dvele modules, Mighty Buildings components, or Boxabl units for your project, you’ll see the delivery receipt and the install photos in your documentation folder.
We stand behind every job. Haven Standard, Clause 5: no surprises. That means no door upsell, no scope creep, no “while we’re in here.” If we missed something in our initial assessment, that’s our cost to absorb, not yours.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed - Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license their state requires.
- Insured & bonded - Coverage that protects your property while we’re on it.
- Years of local experience - Serving Simi Valley and surrounding communities since 2015.
- Strong local reputation - Built one project, one documented record, one homeowner relationship at a time.
These credentials matter because an ADU is not a small project. It’s a secondary dwelling on your property, permitted as permanent housing, subject to state building code, local zoning, and utility interconnection. The person who designs it needs to understand what the inspector will ask. The person who builds it needs to understand why the drawing specified that shear wall nailing pattern. When you hire us, you’re hiring a team that has navigated Simi Valley’s specific ADU requirements repeatedly, with documentation to show for it.
Rooted in Simi Valley
Our trucks start their days from here, not from a dispatch center two counties away. We’ve pulled permits at Simi Valley City Hall on East Tapo Street enough times to know which plans examiners ask about fire separation first, and which ones start with parking calculations. We’ve built ADUs in neighborhoods from Wood Ranch to Royal Highlands to the older streets near downtown where the lots are smaller and the setbacks tighter. We know that a project in Chatsworth faces different soil conditions than one in Thousand Oaks, and we account for that in our feasibility studies. This is where we work, where we live, and where we keep our field notebooks.
Written by Nadia Ellery, Owner at Ellery ADU Studio Simi Valley, serving Simi Valley since 2015.