Our Philosophy
New houses, old souls.
A house should be beautiful the day it is finished and more beloved every decade after.
Classical Design
The old rules still work.
We design in the traditional language of American building — correct proportion, honest materials, deep porches, rooms shaped for real life. Any style before the 1960s ranch house is home ground for us: farmhouse, colonial, cottage, classical. The goal is a new house that feels like it has always stood on its land.
Building Science
Engineered quietly, built to last.
Behind the classical face is a modern, high-performance envelope: careful air sealing, continuous insulation, wall assemblies designed to dry, mechanical systems sized honestly. The result is a home that is durable, comfortable, healthy, and inexpensive to run — performance well beyond the code minimum, invisible until the first utility bill.
Our Own Hands
A family company with its own crew.
Novarum is a small family design-build company. We general-contract the trades, but the details that make or break a house — exterior trim, interior millwork, the building-science layers — are done by our own carpentry team. It costs more than subbing everything out. It shows.
Where We Come From
Three decades of craft before the first Texas foundation.
Novarum’s roots are in architectural millwork. Founder and president Wladyslaw Mietus spent more than thirty years in Canada mastering cabinetmaking, wood manufacturing, renovation, and construction — work ranging from ornamental structures like the Mattamy Gazebo in Oakville to commercial installations at the University of Toronto, and custom residences across Ontario.
Among those builds was the Ravenhill Home on Georgian Bay — a 3,000-square-foot house designed and executed start to finish. In 2022 the family brought that experience to East Texas and founded Novarum Homes, pairing old-world carpentry with the building-science methods the next hundred years will demand. The workshop instinct never left: we still develop our own assemblies, including a proprietary wall system for small dwellings.
The right house takes a little longer.
Speed, cost, quality — no builder can give you all three. We build for families who choose quality, and we take on only a few homes each year so that choice means something.