Sanj Aggarwal.

Sanj founded Icon Projects in 2004 to build the kind of homes he wanted to see on Greater Vancouver streets — homes that read as quietly intentional from the street and hold up, joint by joint, when you look closely. The company has been a CHBA member since the founding year and Sanj himself holds the Canadian Home Builders' Association Master Residential Builder designation, the highest professional credential a residential builder can carry in Canada.

His path into the trade was the long one — years on framing crews and finish carpentry before ever running a build of his own. That hands-on grounding is the part of Icon's work that doesn't show up in the brochure: knowing what a wall should feel like before the drywall hides it, knowing which subtrade questions are worth slowing the schedule for.

Today Icon runs a deliberately small slate of projects each year — custom homes, major renovations, and the occasional multiplex — concentrated across Vancouver, Burnaby, North and West Vancouver, the Tri-Cities, Richmond, Surrey and the Fraser Valley out to Abbotsford. The studio is licensed by BC Housing and every new home Icon delivers carries the full 2-5-10 warranty as a matter of legal requirement, not marketing copy.

What gets Sanj on a site at 7am isn't the contract — it's the transitions. Where wood meets tile meets glass. Where the envelope steps from rainscreen to flashing to membrane. Hillside lots that need geotechnical thinking before they need an architect. View-lot homes where the framing dictates the sightline and the sightline dictates the framing. Burnaby R1 SSMUH custom builds that ask the same craft question — how do you make four units feel like one home — at twice the regulatory complexity. He works the projects he'd want to live in.

Icon's portfolio reflects that range: the Eagle Mountain Contemporary on a sloped Coquitlam ridge, the Larkspur Residence with its sculpted hillside backyard, Aquila's cedar-deck outdoor program, Firhill in Abbotsford, the Modern Farmhouse in West Abbotsford, the contemporary design & build, and the Great Contemporary Room renovation. Each one is documented on the site at a level of build detail most contractors won't show — because Sanj's view is that a builder's actual work product is the only honest sales material there is.

He lives and works in the Lower Mainland. The phone on the contact page rings to the studio, and the email comes back from him.