About Black Swan Build

Black Swan Build is a residential developer and custom home builder on Long Island, New York. We are not a volume builder. We take on a small number of commissions each decade, and every one is carried from the first walk of the land to the final honing of stone by the people who conceived it.

What we do is narrow and complete. We find and assemble uncommon land, draw the residence with the architect, and build it ourselves: foundations, masonry, the envelope, millwork, joinery, the full interior, and the ground it sits on. Landscape falls inside the same hand. Grade, drainage, walls, planting, irrigation and light are drawn alongside the architecture, so the garden arrives finished rather than furnished afterwards. We also take landscape work on its own, for houses we did not build.

Who it is for: families and individuals who intend to keep the house for a long time. Owners who care more about how a room feels at four in the afternoon than about a list of standard finishes. Some arrive with land already in hand, some arrive with an architect and need a builder who can hold a detail, and some arrive with nothing but a way they want to live, and the land follows. We work with private clients, their architects and their counsel, and we keep every commission confidential.

Who builds it: our own crews, and tradespeople who have worked with the firm for years — the masons, the millworkers, the horticulturists. Site supervision is done by the principals rather than handed off, and the same supervisor stays with a house from the first excavation to the planting of the last specimen. The firm was founded in 2009 on Long Island, New York, and works by appointment only.

This site is an archive of that work: residences completed, work in construction, and private commissions held off the record. What is shown here is a fraction of what has been built, which is the point.