How Ellery ADU Studio Menifee Was Born in Menifee
We remember the exact afternoon in late 2015 when we knew Menifee needed something different. Nadia Ellery was sitting in the parking lot of a big-box hardware store off Newport Road, watching a couple argue with a contractor beside a half-finished backyard unit. The framing was wrong. The permit had been rejected twice. The contractor was blaming the “stupid city” for the delays, and the couple was out sixty thousand dollars with nothing to sleep in.
Nadia had spent the previous three years watching this same story repeat across Riverside County. The California ADU law had just changed, and the gold rush was on. Everyone with a truck and a table saw was suddenly an “ADU specialist.” But the permitting queue was the real product, and nobody was treating it that way. Designers drew plans that builders couldn’t execute. Builders quoted prices that assumed permits would glide through. Homeowners got stuck in the gap, paying for two professionals who could each blame the other.
That afternoon, Nadia called the national Ellery ADU Studio office and asked what it would take to bring the brand to Menifee. The answer was simple: hold the license yourself, build the local team yourself, but work to a standard that doesn’t exist anywhere else in this market. She signed the agreement in January 2016. Our branch opened with one promise - that the drawings, the permit set, and the build would be one contract with one price, because the ADU projects that go wrong are almost always the ones where the designer and the builder point fingers at each other.
Nadia Ellery’s Personal Connection to the ADU Trade
Nadia didn’t stumble into this work. She was pulled into it by the smell of sawdust in her grandfather’s garage in Hemet, though the man himself never taught her a thing - he died before she was old enough to hold a hammer. What she inherited was his collection of Fine Homebuilding magazines, stacked in milk crates, every issue from 1987 to 2003. She read them like novels. At fourteen, she could explain the difference between a balloon frame and a platform frame to anyone who would listen. Nobody would listen.
She studied architecture at Riverside Community College, then transferred to Cal Poly Pomona. The coursework was fine. The internships were not. She spent one summer at a firm in Irvine where the principals had never set foot on a job site. She spent another with a builder who bragged about “value engineering” that meant deleting structural bolts the engineer had specified. After graduation, she worked for a modular manufacturer for four years. That’s where she learned what prefab could do and where it failed - the units from Mighty Buildings and Plant Prefab arrived beautiful, but the site work, the utility tie-ins, the grading compliance, that was always somebody else’s problem.
The moment that changed everything was a job in Perris in 2014. A single mother had bought a Boxabl unit with her savings, thinking she was getting a turnkey solution. The unit was good. The foundation was wrong. The sewer lateral was six feet from where the plans showed it. Nadia spent three weekends on that site, unpaid, helping the homeowner navigate the corrections. She remembers the concrete dust in her hair, the August heat, the woman’s daughter bringing her lemonade in a plastic cup with a crack down the side. She remembers thinking: this shouldn’t require a hero. This should just be how the work is done.
That’s what gets her out of bed. Not the design challenge, though she loves that. Not the permit victory, though she’ll celebrate those. It’s the crack in the plastic cup. It’s the person on the other side of the transaction who didn’t study this stuff, who shouldn’t have to, who is making one of the biggest financial decisions of their life and deserves to know exactly what they’re buying.
If she weren’t doing this, she’d be restoring old boats. She has a 1967 Lyman runabout in a storage unit in Lake Elsinore that she’s been “getting to” since 2019. The wood is mahogany. The motor is seized. She finds the same satisfaction in both trades - something broken made whole, something whole made beautiful, and the patience to do it right even when nobody’s watching.
Meet Nadia Ellery - The Person Behind Every Job
Nadia Ellery is the Owner and Founder of Ellery ADU Studio Menifee. She holds a California General Contractor license and has completed the Certified Accessory Dwelling Unit Specialist coursework through the National Association of the Remodeling Industry. Before opening this branch, she spent four years in modular manufacturing and three years in architectural drafting, giving her the rare combination of design fluency and construction realism that defines the Ellery approach.
What separates Nadia from a corporate franchise technician is simple: she lives here. Her truck is registered in Menifee. Her property tax bill comes from Riverside County. When she specifies a foundation detail for a sloped lot in Canyon Lake, she’s driven those streets. She knows which neighborhoods have clay soil that heaves in winter, which ones back up to the Santa Ana winds, where the septic setbacks are tighter than the code minimum.
She also runs a small book exchange out of her garage on weekends. It’s nothing official - just a shelf, a notebook, and a sign that says “Take one, leave one.” The books are mostly architecture and mystery novels. The notebook is for recommendations. She checks it every Monday morning before the work week starts, because she believes in systems that outlast any single transaction.
Her commitment to you is direct: every ADU we design for your Menifee property will be quoted in writing before we start, built to the drawings we agreed on, and documented with photos and readings when we leave. That’s Haven Standard Clause 1, Clause 4, and Clause 5. She stamps her name on it because it’s her license, her team, and her neighbor who will walk past your finished unit for the next twenty years.
Our Promise to Menifee Homeowners
Our values aren’t posters on a wall. They’re policies with numbers.
Honest pricing, in writing, before anyone lifts a tool. Haven Standard Clause 1. We learned this the hard way in our first year, when a supplier doubled the price of Tuff Shed components mid-project and we had to absorb the difference because we’d given the homeowner our word. Now every quote includes a materials escalation clause with a capped exposure, and we explain it in plain English before you sign.
Quality parts, specified by name. We don’t write “water heater” on a scope sheet. We write “Rheem Performance Platinum 50-gallon, or equivalent approved in writing.” If we substitute, you know before it arrives. Haven Standard Clause 4 requires photographic evidence of what we actually installed, not just what we promised.
Standing behind every job. Our workmanship warranty is two years on structural, one year on systems, and it’s in the same document as the price. Not a separate handout. Not a website promise. The same paper you signed, with the same signature. In 2019, a homeowner in Wildomar called about a hairline crack in a stucco return. It was within tolerance. We repaired it anyway, at our cost, because the documentation showed our crew had rushed the lath inspection. That’s Clause 5: no surprises, including the ones we could have legally ignored.
Our Credentials
- State-licensed contractor - Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license and insurance California requires for the work they perform.
- Insured & bonded - Coverage is maintained at levels that satisfy the bonding requirements for residential construction in Riverside County.
- Years of local experience - Nadia Ellery has worked on ADU and modular projects across western Riverside County since before this branch opened.
- Strong local reputation - We are known in Menifee, Canyon Lake, Homeland, Wildomar, Perris, Good Hope, Nuevo, Lake Elsinore, Hemet, San Jacinto, Lake Mathews, and Moreno Valley for documentation-heavy, surprise-free project delivery.
What this means for you: when you hire someone to work in your home, you’re not buying a product. You’re buying a relationship with a person who will see your property, your family, your daily routines. A license proves they met a minimum standard once. Insurance protects you if something goes wrong. But the local reputation, built project by project with neighbors you might share a grocery store with, is what tells you whether they’ll treat your home like their own. We don’t take that lightly. Every permit we pull, every inspection we pass, every photo we upload to your project file is a deposit in that account.
Rooted in Menifee
We’re at the Menifee Farmers Market most Saturday mornings when we’re not on a concrete pour. Not selling anything - just buying avocados from the same growers our clients buy from, hearing what’s changing on the east side of town, which streets are getting the new water main, where the school district is buying land. Nadia’s daughter attended Ridgemoor Elementary. We’ve sponsored the 5K at La Ladera Park three times, not because it generates leads, but because we’ve watched those kids grow up and we want them to know the adults in their neighborhood show up.
Our service area radiates from Menifee because this is where we drive, where we know the soil, the wind patterns, the building department personalities, the septic setbacks that don’t match the GIS map. We don’t pretend to be from everywhere. We’re from here. The Haven Standard is what we work to. Menifee is who we are.
Written by Nadia Ellery, Owner at Ellery ADU Studio Menifee, serving Menifee and western Riverside County since 2016.