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Houzz helps remodelers nail down their dreams

Houzz guides homeowners through the maze of vendors and options

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(from left to right)Kristine Boyden, Scott Taylor and their contractor Aaron Gordon pose for a portrait in their home in San Francisco, Calif. on August 1, 2013. Taylor and Boyden used an application on their iPad to find ideas for renovations of their home.
(from left to right)Kristine Boyden, Scott Taylor and their contractor Aaron Gordon pose for a portrait in their home in San Francisco, Calif. on August 1, 2013. Taylor and Boyden used an application on their iPad to find ideas for renovations of their home.Ian C. Bates/The Chronicle

In renovating their 1889 flat in the Castro, Kristine Boyden and Scott Taylor wanted to respect its Victorian aesthetic while infusing their own style and modernizing.

"That was a tough balance," Boyden said. "We had no vocabulary to speak to our architect or contractor to convey things we wanted to do."

So they turned to Houzz, an online resource with a vast array of "ideabooks" packed with photos of home remodeling and decor projects; portfolios from and reviews of home-improvement and design professionals; and a worldwide community of homeowners sharing advice.

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"Houzz was our Rosetta Stone in translating our ideas about better space to our architect and contractor so they could help us make it real," Boyden said. "It's a great tool to navigate the entire process of remodeling and finishing a house."

Some 15 million homeowners a month likewise use Houzz - which combines elements of Pinterest and Angie's List with a splash of Yelp - for inspiration and connections to about 250,000 home-makeover pros, from architects to kitchen remodelers to landscape designers.

"Someone can ask an open question then await the generous concepts introduced by the life tenured, the hobbyist or trained professional to emerge," one user wrote in a discussion on kitchen cabinets. An accompanying article plumbed the topic "from Shaker to flat panel, from corbels to aprons, from glass knobs to recessed pulls."

Houzz originated in 2009 when the husband-and-wife team of Alon Cohen, 42, and Adi Tatarko, 40, were remodeling their Palo Alto ranch house, untouched since it was built in 1955.

"It was a nightmare," Tatarko said, sipping her tea, made with fresh mint snipped from the living green wall of herbs and succulents in Houzz's airy office in downtown Palo Alto. "Many people expressed the same frustrations to us: It's hard to find good professionals, hard to communicate what you want, hard to keep to a budget."

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Their architect asked them to comb through magazines and books for photos they liked.

'Took forever'

"It was a linear process to go page by page and took forever," Cohen said. "We said, 'There has to be a better way to do this; we're in the 21st century.' I started coding and Adi starting reaching out to professionals in San Francisco, as well as homeowners who were parents at our kids' school here in Palo Alto."

A year later the site was so popular that both quit their jobs - he was a technology director at eBay; she worked for a boutique investment firm - and hired two employees, and lined up $2 million in initial funding. They raised another $11.6 million in 2011 and $35 million in January.

"I found Houzz as I was remodeling my own home," Yammer founder David Sacks, who invested in the January round, said in a statement. "The company has solidified itself as the leading player and chief disrupter in the $300 billion home remodeling and design industry."

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Tall order

Disrupting that gargantuan industry is a tall order, but Houzz's founders take it in stride.

"The beauty and fun of doing this is that there was nothing there before for this industry," Tatarko said. "Since it was so primitive, everything you touch makes a huge impact."

With the capital infusions, Houzz, which doesn't disclose revenues or profits, is continuing to evolve with features and employees.

This year it added a tool to compare remodeling costs by geography with input from users nationwide: slicing and dicing expenses for each aspect of a kitchen remodel in St. Louis, Miami or upstate New York, for instance.

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Also new: Houzz Pro+, which lets home-redo professionals pay to showcase their portfolios to local homeowners.

Most of the site is free for both end users and professionals. Houzz generates revenue through advertising and Pro+. (Houzz also provides content for The Chronicle's website, SFGate.com.)

Aaron Gordon, who owns an eponymous 18-person contracting company in San Francisco, said the $500 a month he pays to be featured in Pro+ is "nominal" for exposing his firm to potential customers attuned to the high-end work he does, not just folks looking for someone to fix a leaky toilet.

"It brings serious people looking to do larger remodels," he said. "I can put up pictures and descriptions of my projects. Someone searching for a modern kitchen in San Francisco, for instance, will see photos of my work, and get a real feeling for what I do."

Houzz has 120 employees, about half in a sales office in Orange County and the other half in Palo Alto. It moved in May to a downtown location with the requisite open workbenches along with many touches of design whimsy: three private phone booths (with free working "pay phones") in Houzz's signature chartreuse-green color; a dozen conference rooms each decorated to represent a different area in a home. The "closet" has neat rows of black Houzz T-shirts, fleeces and slippers; the "patio" has tall plants, ersatz grass, a sun umbrella and outdoor furniture.

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Division of labor

Tatarko, who is CEO, and Cohen, Houzz's president, sit at open workbenches on opposite ends of the room. She focuses more on the editorial and business; he on the product and engineering side.

The couple, who met 18 years ago on a lengthy bus ride in Thailand while on vacation from college in their native Israel, seem simpatico, fluidly finishing each other's sentences. (Their "affectionate bickering suggest a dot-com Lucy and Desi," the New York Times wrote of them.)

Isn't it tough for a couple to rack up grueling start-up hours side by side?

"It's a lot easier to work together than it is to remodel together," Cohen said.

In fact, they're still renovating their ranch house, all these years later.

"We did it in phases; we hopefully are on the final phase," Tatarko said. "We're doing the landscaping and adding a guest bedroom that's now being connected to the house."

Their 11-year-old son recently asked to come to a meeting with their contractor.

"He said he had an ideabook to show us," Tatarko said. "He found examples on Houzz of people who put basketball courts inside their garage, and he wants one at our house. His 7 1/2-year-old brother sat there, nodding his head in agreement."

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid

Carolyn Said, an enterprise reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, covers transformation: how society, business, culture, education and other institutions are changing. Her stories shed light on the human impact of sweeping trends. As a reporter at The Chronicle since 1997, she has also covered the on-demand industry, the foreclosure crisis, the dot-com rise and fall, the California energy crisis and the fallout from economic downturns.

She can be reached at csaid@sfchronicle.com.