We broke ground on our first Home Depot in 1996. Nearly three decades later, Double AA Builders has delivered more than 50 ground-up, stand-alone stores averaging 145,000 square feet each, plus development of the attached sites — often ten acres or more of parking, drives, utilities and hardscape per location.
Fifty buildings for one client is not fifty separate projects. It is one long relationship with fifty milestones, and it works differently than one-off construction.
The stores share a prototype. High bays, lumber yards, drive-through contractor areas, large garden centers with their own structure and irrigation, and a front end built to a national standard. That repetition is an advantage: the details are known, the subcontractor base is trained on them, and a problem that appeared on store twelve never appears again on store thirteen.
What varies is nearly everything outside the building line. Every jurisdiction has its own review cycle, drainage requirements, landscape ordinance and utility provider. Southern California and Arizona are not the same permitting environment, and neither are two neighboring municipalities in the same county. Most of the risk on a national retail program lives in entitlement and site work, not in the box.
The opening date is the one immovable fact. A retailer plans staffing, inventory, advertising and district logistics around a grand opening that has been on the calendar for a year. Missing it is not a schedule discussion — it is a business event. We build every store backwards from that date, with merchandising set, fixture installation and vendor turnover treated as hard milestones rather than closeout activities.
Beyond ground-up work, we have remodeled more than a dozen existing stores — adding square footage, expanding garden centers and reconfiguring front ends while the store stays open and trading. Occupied retail remodels are their own discipline: temporary partitions, dust and noise control, night work, customer and associate safety, and a life-safety plan that stays valid through every phase.
The other thing a long program teaches is cost predictability. When you have built the same prototype fifty times across two states, budgeting stops being an estimate and becomes a record. That is worth as much to a national client as the construction itself.
Programs like this are earned one store at a time. There is no pitch that wins a fiftieth building — only forty-nine that went well. That track record, more than any single project, is the credential we are proudest of.
If you run a multi-site retail program in the Southwest, we would like to talk. Learn more on our retail segment page, or call our Scottsdale office at (480) 994-0400.
