The garden wall began as gray block. It rose course by course around an arched window, with a pier at one side reinforced with rebar, before Glen Darger covered it in stucco and framed the arch in brick.
Darger owns Intermountain Contractors, a masonry company in Draper, Utah. He specializes in brick, block and stone. By his count the company dates to about 2017, but the trade goes back much further. “I’ve been doing the masonry my whole life,” he says.
A good deal of his finished work starts the way that wall did, with structure that ends up out of sight. On an outdoor kitchen built under a pavilion, the block core went up first and the concrete counters were set on it. The brick came last. A round fire pit began as a block core with the gas line already in place, and only then did the stone veneer go on. On other jobs the block is set over rebar and grouted, from the first courses on a footing to the walls of a commercial building.
Most of what he builds is residential, and the jobs vary widely in size. A chimney repair takes him two days at most, he says. A big commercial job can run two or three months. Builders bring him work as well. “I do a lot of custom work for general contractors,” Darger says.
Custom is where masonry stops fitting into categories. He has built brick and stone mailbox pillars, some of them capped in stone, and a cluster of stone mailboxes. In a school gym, a stone pedestal holds a bear statue beside a stone bench platform. In a real estate office, a brick feature wall runs through the lobby and up the stairwell. Inside one house he built a stone accent wall with shelving set into it. In another, an old brick fireplace was torn out down to the firebox and replaced with a modern double-sided gas fireplace in a clean white surround.
Some jobs ask the new work to disappear into the old. A homeowner who added a garage during a remodel said afterward that matching the existing brick had mattered to him, and that people who see the addition remark on how the new brick ties it to the house.
Darger’s rule for the rest of it is short. “You’re only as good as your word,” he says.
The pandemic didn’t hurt the business, he says, and he didn’t let it change how he worked. “I pretended like it didn’t exist,” Darger says. “People are still building houses.”
In the finished garden wall, the gray block and the rebar pier are gone under the stucco. What shows is the brick trim curving around the arched window, and the gate.