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Building & Craftsmanship
The Tools of Success
by Greg O’Brien
With skillful planning and moral aptitude, an East Falmouth
man turns his passion for construction into a solidly built career.
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| tom sobolik |
| Ralph Cataldo, principal of Cataldo Custom Builders, has over 20 years of experience building on Cape Cod. To ensure a smooth construction process for this intricately designed home (seen from the water, opposite, and from the street, top), Cataldo notes, “We had a great project team that met regularly on-site.” |
Intuitive and blessed with the discernment of an engineer, Ralph Cataldo could always connect the dots. As a gifted project manager for Wang Laboratories in Lowell in the early 1980s and earning a heady corporate salary, he saw the handwriting on the screen. The computer industry, at least as it related to Cataldo’s job—overseeing high-volume manufacturing lines that produced 22,000 circuit boards a week—was about to implode. Smaller computers meant less space, and less space meant hundreds of layoffs.
And so Cataldo, who hadn’t picked up a hammer until he was almost 25, morphed—with characteristic grit and integrity—into one of the most successful and skilled custom builders on Cape Cod. It was a relocation and a reincarnation that took years to unfold, but today Cataldo arguably has had more to do with the graceful transformation of Falmouth’s waterfront than anyone or anything since the Laurentide ice sheet dumped its mass of rock and soil to form the Upper Cape more than 19,000 years ago.
Necessity has always been the mother of reinvention, and often an open door to a new life. Twenty-four years ago, Cataldo and his wife, Marion, had just moved into a new house in southern New Hampshire, and like most young couples didn’t have the money to complete the project. They needed a back deck. A problem solver by trade, Cataldo bought a book on building, a few tools, and by sheer instinct built a large deck.
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| don borowski |
| During the 18 months it took to complete this waterfront home, Cataldo’s crew faced some very harsh weather conditions. In order to brace the home against the elements, architect Jeremiah Eck of Boston called for approximately 22 steel I-beams, which had to be installed with a crane. Also, countless special connectors were required to protect the structure from high winds and uplift. |
Just in time, he had stumbled onto a new career.
“I liked it so much that I started working with a framing crew on weekends while I was at Wang,” he recalls, seated at a large desk in the offices of Cataldo Custom Builders, Inc. off Route 28 in East Falmouth, surrounded by majestic framed photographs of high-end homes that his company has built or renovated over the years—some as large as 10,000 square feet. “I simply enjoyed it. I had a real passion for the work.”
Soon one framing job led to another, each one more complex than the last, and all with good references for future work. The sense of accomplishment was addictive, but Cataldo didn’t dare quit his day job. “They were paying me too much,” he says, detailing his responsibilities for overseeing teams of technicians and scores of budgets—work that swept him across the country. Still, Cataldo, a graduate of Lowell Tech, now University of Massachusetts Lowell, could see the shadows at the end of his tunnel. Consolidations would soon redefine the computer business, and he knew he’d need to look for a new line of work.
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| all photos by peter vanderwarker |
| This year-round residence, designed by architect Doreve Nicholaeff, took 14 months to build and includes many curved rooms, archways, and highly detailed millwork. For a project of this complexity, explains Cataldo, the land surveyor first creates control points. These points are then used to establish centerlines, curves, and intersections for the entire house—from the basement to the rooflines. |
After Cataldo consulted with his wife, the couple opted for a toe-in-the-water approach—literally. In 1984 they moved to a new house they had just built themselves in Falmouth, where Marion had summered as a child. Cataldo started building spec homes on weekends and holidays while commuting during the week to New Hampshire. He then found a challenging job closer to home—at a Digital Equipment Corporation plant in Franklin. Finally in 1990, with his future in the computer industry as dim as dusk on Cape Cod Bay, Cataldo abruptly left his job. “I had no choice,” he says. “I had to quit outright.”
With no business plan or huge severance, only his deep faith, the abiding support of his wife, and good references from previous construction work, Cataldo started a gutsy new venture—Cataldo Builders. But this was no crapshoot. “I had been working on crews for framing, siding, roofing, and finish work,” he says. “I knew how a house was put together. Fortunately, I had assimilated organizational and management skills from the corporate world to deal with subcontractors on a large scale. I knew how to budget, how to communicate with clients, and most importantly, how to get a job done on time and under great pressure.”
Not surprisingly, Cataldo quickly hit his stride. He immediately bought a piece of land and built a spec house. Then he built another, and yet another. Spec houses on the Cape, averaging about 1,000 square feet, were selling in those days like fresh fish on the dock.
“By the end of the ’80s, the Cape was slowly shifting from its cottage phase, the projects were getting bigger, people started adding two-car garages and family rooms, the economy was good, interest rates were down, and the average size of a home grew to over 2,000 square feet.”
Then came the crash of ’87, when the bottom fell out of the economy and the building trades. Banks and mortgage companies, who years earlier had been photocopying building loan applications and writing checks in three days, were foreclosing on over-mortgaged spec builders, some of whom had borrowed up to 20 times their worth. Learning from his earlier days that the gravy often runs dry, Cataldo had taken a conservative approach, building two spec homes at a time, while others had been constructing five or ten.
He survived the crash, and a few years later reinvented himself once again—this time in an even more impressive metamorphosis. With a knack for choosing the right course, Cataldo followed the destructive path of Hurricane Bob in 1991 and embarked on a new career building and renovating high-end homes. “Bob gave us a lot of work; a lot of huge homes on the water had to be rebuilt. The work was more challenging, more structural and technical, less risky than building spec homes. And the money was guaranteed.”
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| don borowski |
There was plenty of work picking up after Hurricane Bob—whose 125-mile-an-hour winds sheared off treetops like a chain saw and whose nine-foot storm surge was the worst since Hurricane Donna in 1960. The ensuing property damage,almost a billion dollars in New England, was the costliest since Hur-ricane Carol in 1954. Cataldo then began collaborating with top architects in the Falmouth area, building 5,000- to 6,000-square-foot homes, an average size that grew over time by several thousand square feet. Over the last 12 years, Cataldo has built more than 50 large houses in Falmouth, Mashpee, and Osterville for high-end clients like bank presidents, investment bankers, stockbrokers, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and celebrities—mostly one-of-a-kind, two- to three-story homes with swimming pools, cabanas, docks, three-car garages, and separate living quarters for extended family and guests. The red cedar–shingled pitched roofs, dormers, gables, and ells in some of these homes make them look like storybook mansions.
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| ralph cataldo |
Cataldo’s corporate experience coordinating budgets, directing squads of workers making complex presentations, and exceeding expectations gave him an edge over the competition, but he is the first to assert that the construction of high-end homes is a collaborative effort. “In addition to having a great in-house staff, you have to create a management team: architect, builder, interior designer, landscape architect, engineer, and sometimes other specialty consultants,” he notes. “It is vital for both the architect and builder to be compatible with the client. They must be exceptional listeners and develop a level of trust—as a team that will implement the client’s ideas, not its own, and one that will anticipate problems before they become costly overruns.”
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| tom sobolik |
| Architect Doreve Nicholaeff truly maximized the available site in designing this luxury three-story home, distinguished by numerous curved features and custom millwork. In the backyard, a patio of granite pavers and quartzite stone surrounds the infinity pool. |
And the team has to meet deadlines. Cataldo doesn’t over schedule, instead limiting his daily construction work to three or four high-end homes at a time in different phases of construction. His greatest achievement, he says, was completing two 7,000-square-foot homes in five months. It was a great success, but he doesn’t advise taking on this kind of challenge blithely. Such a schedule is one he doesn’t recommend and the feat can happen only under certain circumstances and with an excellent team, great clients, and superb organization.
Successful high-end home construction, Cataldo explains, takes several ingredients: honesty, integrity, and consistent moral values. “Clients can detect this in a builder. To be successful, you have to run your business the way you run your life, you have to surround yourself with the types of people you would invite into your own home, you have to hire employees and subcontractors who have the same moral and ethical values as you, and you have to do exactly what you tell clients you are going to do.”
There is little margin for error. Construction costs in high-end homes run between $200 and $500 a square foot; that doesn’t include the soft costs of architectural fees, engineering fees, interior design and specialty consultant fees, and permitting and landscaping work. Exterior landscape costs increase each year, Cataldo says, mainly from the use of native fieldstone that is heavily incorporated into most designs. “In the end, our clients want to feel comfortable that they are getting a fair deal, and they insist on not being taken advantage of,” he summarizes. “If you ignore these fundamental rules, your career in this business is over.”
With more than 175 homes under his belt and an assortment of commercial jobs, Cataldo’s career couldn’t be brighter. Clients like Cape restaurateur Bobby Byrne, for whom Cataldo has built two homes and renovated three restaurants, once booked an ad in The Falmouth Enterprise extolling his builder’s moral fiber. “I continue to marvel at the care, the talent, the character, and the dedication of Ralph Cataldo and his associates . . . I have never observed such attention to detail, to quality, to costs, to excellence,” the ad read.
A consummate family man with two daughters—a 20-year-old nursing student at UMass Dartmouth and a 17-year-old senior at Falmouth High School—Cataldo is highly regarded at home as well. He credits his wife and father with providing great and timely inspiration. His wife, he says, “understands the responsibilities and required commitments for a young entrepreneur to succeed.” His father, he adds, taught him “the value of the little guy.”
“I’ll never forget the summer job my father got me in college, working on an assembly line at Polaroid where the team had to assemble 6,200 cameras a day, with each step taking no more than 12 seconds. It was absolute torture, but it was a lesson my father wanted me to learn. Today, I respect everyone’s em-ployees and the value of their input.”
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| tom sobolik |
Team: it’s the core of Cataldo’s existence. No team, however, can succeed without a great leader. It is now late on a Friday afternoon, the sun has set hours ago, and Cataldo, a multi tasker, is still at his desk poring over paperwork, reviewing progress reports, and tending to the finer points of his work. Asked for a description of his job, he considers the question, mulling over in his mind more than 20 years of construction. He smiles, then replies with the innocence of a schoolboy, “I guess you could say making the impossible happen when it has to happen.”
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