Polhemus Savery DaSilva

Eighty-seven project sets on Houzz and a National Custom Home Builder of the Year award — and the only two people who brought PSD up unprompted on Reddit both landed on the same line: you pay for the name. Polhemus Savery DaSilva designs and builds high-end custom homes from an office on Route 137 in East Harwich, working Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and coastal southeastern New England. The firm says it was founded in 1996 as one of the region's first fully integrated design-and-construction practices, and that it is led by Aaron Polhemus with John R. DaSilva as design principal; its BBB page counts 49 employees. The whole operation is built around one idea: architecture and construction under a single roof on large custom projects. The scale is documented rather than asserted. Building-permit records on BuildZoom show at least 11 projects in the past three years, a typical permit around $193,000 and several above $1m — new Cape houses, whole-house renovations, additions. Houzz carries 87 project photo sets, a 4.9 average across 12 ratings, and an award list running from the New England Design Hall of Fame to Best of Boston Home and Ocean Home's Top 50 Coastal Architects. First-hand written accounts are the thin part. One review is on file — a 2022 Google reviewer impressed by the proposal and the crew — and Google's own average is 4.2 from five ratings. The organic word-of-mouth runs the other way. In a May 2025 Cape Cod Reddit thread, one commenter said to stay away from PSD and the other big firms because they are expensive and there are better builders you do not pay a name premium for; a second commenter in the same thread said PSD may be among the most expensive but is not the best. Neither described a specific project. If you want one firm carrying both design and construction on a large Cape build, PSD is one of very few at this size and pedigree. Ask what the integrated fee covers against hiring an architect and a builder separately, and take comparison bids — the recurring outside criticism is price, not craft. Its licence numbers here come from directory listings rather than a registry check, so confirm the current registration before you sign.