HOW THIS FAMILY BUSINESS IS STILL BUILDING AUSTIN
Third-generation company adapted and helped create the home design trends in Austin.
“It’s a love story,” Dolores Davis says about the company her parents built. She’s speaking in a documentary CG&S Design-Build made to celebrate 60 years of the home design and remodeling company
It’s the story of when two kids from Austin, Clarence and Stella Guerrero, met at a dance at St. Edward’s University.
“He came and asked my friend to dance, but somebody beat him to it,” Stella Guerrero, 85, says in the documentary. “I was left all alone at the table, so he asked me to dance.”
Clarence Guerrero grew up with a father and brother who were carpenters. “I followed him when I was about 4,” Clarence Guerrero, 89, says of his father. “I went with him everywhere he went.”
After a short time in the Navy, Clarence Guerrero went into carpentry, too. “That’s all I knew,” he says.
He knew how to build a home, and he knew how to sell the job to a client. He did not know how to do the books or pay the taxes.
That became Stella Guerrero’s role. “The business would not have made it without her,” says son and CG&S co-owner Billy Guerrero.
“It was a match made in heaven,” Davis says.
CG&S Design-Build will celebrate its 60th anniversary Sept. 23 with a party for employees and friends of the firm. It’s a business that grew from a mom-and-pop operation to a company with 31 employees working on about 60 to 65 projects a year out of the South Austin house that once held the family of 10, plus the foster children the Guerreros took in.
CG&S Design-Build has seen Austin’s home design style grow from simple and practical to more sophisticated and architectural. The company has won awards for its projects and had homes on numerous home tours. It’s weathered the lean years of 1986, 2001 and 2009 when the housing, building and remodeling