Stan Acton

About Stan

Stan has been a builder since he was ten. The day he broke his father's heirloom mallet, he grabbed a piece of firewood, climbed onto his grandfather's Shopsmith lathe, and turned a new one. Work the problem. Respect the craft. Make it right. That instinct never left him. His high school wood shop teacher, Bud Jamison, turned the instinct into design, and remodeling contractor John Warren, who Stan apprenticed under while earning a computer science degree, taught him the two lessons that still define the company: quality is non-negotiable, and integrity is everything.

After four years at Texas Instruments, the craft won. In the spring of 1990 Stan founded Acton Construction and spent thirty years earning a reputation across the Bay Area for design-build work that was functional, lasting, and charming, delivered with certainty, transparency, and value. Then in early 2017, standing in the closet of his historic Naglee Park home under a swinging light bulb, he saw what was coming for California: housing costs climbing, families priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in, aging parents needing care close by, adult children needing a place to land.

He didn't see a building problem. He saw a family problem. So he named it, Family Integrity Planning, and reshaped the company around it. Acton Construction became Acton ADU. Today Stan writes about what he and his team have learned across backyard homes in Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties and, more recently, the San Gabriel Valley, the Westside, and Central LA: what a lot can hold, what the rules allow, what things cost, and how to build a home that performs for decades. The reason he built Acton ADU is simple: he wants to help families stay together.