About
Rob Van Deren
Rob has been building in Steamboat Springs since 2005. In that time, he's never taken out an ad. Every project has come through a referral, a past client, an architect, someone who watched a build go up and wanted to know who was behind it.
Two decades of the same approach will do that.
He didn't come up through construction in the traditional sense. Rob has two business degrees from Indiana University and spent time running a hedge fund before a car accident in Florida changed direction. He came back to construction not as a framer who worked his way up, but as someone who looked at the industry from the outside and saw where the money was disappearing. Hidden markups on materials. Invoices that didn't add up. A gap between what clients were told and what things actually cost.
CHS was built around the opposite. Every draw backed by individual vendor invoices. Every trade discount passed to the client. CHS's fee is a single line item, visible from the first draw to the last. Clients who've built with him — CEOs, attorneys, multi-generational families — have the sophistication to check every number. They do. Nothing is hidden because nothing needs to be.
The other thing Rob brought from outside the industry was an eye. His background in art shows up in the details that don't appear in the plans: a fireplace finished by hand to hit a specific look, a staircase railing designed from scratch because nothing stock was right, a bank vault door sourced from a demolition in Craig and rebuilt into a gun room because that's a better story than a standard safe.
Rob answers his own phone. One project manager per job: himself. Something goes wrong on a Friday night, you're not waiting until Monday.
That's been the model since 2005. It's not changing.
