“You’re not going to be sent to a subcontractor,” Fabian Romero says. “You’re not going to be sent to someone that doesn’t know you personally.”
That line is the company’s main argument. “All of our labor is in-house,” he says. The people a homeowner sits down with at the start are the people who show up with the tools.
Fabian and his brother David Romero run Iconic Upscale together, and they split the work. A customer who hired them for a back patio described the arrangement after the job. Fabian was the salesman who took time to understand what the couple wanted and never pushed. David was the general contractor who managed the build. Knowing the two were brothers, she added, made it feel like working with people who had each other’s backs.
David is a civil engineer, and it shows in how the company talks about its work. Its site calls the firm engineering-focused and lays out the structural choices in plain terms. Footings are designed to hold up in Houston’s shifting clay soil. Wood is kept off the ground on steel post bases rather than buried in concrete, because buried wood wicks moisture and rots.
Before anything is built, the firm produces a 3D design so the homeowner can see the finished space. It also handles the engineering, drawings and submittals for permits and homeowners’ association approval.
The work is mostly residential. Fabian describes it as outdoor remodeling “from the design to the construction”: pergolas, patio covers, stamped concrete, decks and outdoor kitchens. Asked what he would like the company to be known for, he keeps it short. “Residential, yes. In patio covers, residential.”
Most jobs fall in Houston, Katy, Cypress and Sugar Land, though Fabian says the company works across the greater Houston area. The office is in west Houston, near Memorial.
He tells the company’s start briefly. He and David began it because they thought outdoor remodeling was needed and worth doing, a way to improve families’ lives and the way people spend time together. The brothers grew up around construction, building, renovating and designing, and the company’s own account of itself describes a patio as the place where a kid does homework on a Sunday or where a birthday party spills outside when the house gets crowded.
Iconic Upscale now has designers, project managers and craftsmen on staff, but Fabian still describes it the way it began, as a family business, and says those family values carry into how the work is run. “We respect our clients and we value their money and their time,” he says.
For a small outfit, the question comes down to who answers the phone and who ends up in the backyard. Fabian intends for those to be the same people. “The same team that talks to you in the first meeting,” he says, “will be the same team that will do the project.”