The couple that’s renovating design-build software
In 2018, Materio’s founders Mary Beth and Thomas Chau started a renovation. This was their second renovation but this time it would be different.
Mary Beth and Thomas Chau
Photo by @gna.creative
With the demands of full-time jobs (because you know someone has to pay for the renovation), it was difficult to keep up with their project status and decisions. Mary Beth was the designer on the project and that in itself seemed to take at least 40 hours a week.
With an architect drawing plans and the rigorous building code requirements of New York City, a year was spent in the phase, design phase. During this long and painful process, Materio was conceptualized.
Sure, we’d heard of other systems. (You know the ones we are talking about). But they weren’t current enough. They didn’t meet the demands of today’s clients and modern designers and builders. We had to make it better.
Our founders experienced the mess that any residential project entails: dozens of pages of plans (changing daily), spreadsheets, hundreds of selections, thousands of emails and text messages, and no way to answer a simple question: what did we decide, again? (Hello, chaos!)
Mary Beth comes from a family of contractors and designers and so they started there. Asking questions, conducting research, and doing site visits whenever possible. Thomas and Mary Beth crafted a vision for what the future of design and construction collaboration could look like, with clients’ involvement too! When they spoke with builders and designers, they all said the same thing: that they spend a huge amount of effort on things not designing or building the home but rather on the phone, getting approvals, documenting change, fixing mistakes, or digging for answers in the inbox.
They realized what was needed was a connected system that supported teams by guiding a project from start to finish. The industry needed an “autopilot for home building project management” that could help teams transform a blurry sketch full of question marks into a move-in ready home. They imagined a system for handling all of the unknowns, approvals, and changes, while also integrating all the decisions into one place. The system would keep the team on track. On a mission and determined to rethink the future of construction, Materio was built.
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