A builder who reads drawings the way an architect does — because he was trained to.

Doty began in an architecture school’s model shop. Before it was a construction company it was a pair of hands learning that a joint you can draw is not the same as a joint you can build, and that the distance between the two is where most houses fall apart.

James Doty holds a Bachelor of Architecture. He spent the years after school on working sites — first framing and finishing, then managing — and what he took from both halves of that education is the sense of a drawing as a promise a builder owes the architect.