A shop, not a startup.
Square One Studio is a custom commercial millwork shop. We've been at 3114 Holmes Street in Kansas City since 1997 — 25 people, 30,000 square feet of production floor, working for Helix, HMN, JE Dunn, BNIM, Hoefer Welker, McCownGordon, and a few dozen other architects and GCs.
We make reception desks, conference tables, wall paneling, custom casework, and the kind of one-off built-in that needs a designer, a CNC programmer, an assembler, a finisher, and a PM to make happen in 8 weeks.
Why we built this.
For 25 years we ran the shop the way most shops run: an estimator's spreadsheet, a PM's email archive, a draftsman's Bluebeam session, and a shop foreman's clipboard. It worked, sort of. We made our numbers most years. But every Monday someone spent two hours reconstructing what happened the week before.
Then Bryan (our GM) got into Claude Code. Six months later we had 143 tools, 19 Resources, 7 Prompts, a Postgres-ready SQLite backend, a Bluebeam bridge, an AI shop assistant, and a weekly dashboard that replaces the Monday-morning archaeology session.
A few other shop owners asked if they could buy it. So here we are.
The canonical case study.
Square One is the reference customer. Everything you see in the product was built against our real workflow, our real Bryan-and-Chad ops review, our real submittal-response cycle. Here's what changed after we rolled it out:
Bryan's calendar before and after. Six hours is mostly architect follow-up; the rest is the system.
Bluebeam session opens straight from the submittal record. Markup → revision package is one tool call.
Better cost data + scope checks → fewer free-add change orders + tighter labor estimates.
Who you're talking to.
Bryan Peek
General Manager · Square One Studio
Built this. Runs ops. Picks up the phone. shop@sqonestudio.com
Chad
Owner · Square One Studio
Signs the checks. Decides which clients we take. Strong opinions on ebonized walnut.