He Doesn't Talk About the Fire. He Talks About the Rebuilding.
Who we are, why this is the work we chose, and why families in the hills hand us their house keys.
Paul Amaral, Founder & General Contractor
Paul comes from an East Bay Portuguese family that has worked the building trades here for three generations — concrete, carpentry, dairy barns before that. He was a twenty-two-year-old apprentice carpenter in October of 1991, when the firestorm came through the Oakland hills — twenty-five lives, more than three thousand homes, whole neighborhoods gone in a single afternoon. He spent the years that followed doing what half the carpenters in the East Bay did: rebuilding them.
He doesn't talk much about the firestorm itself. He talks about the rebuilding — about families living in rentals for two and three years, about what was actually lost between the insurance checks and the move-back date. And he talks about what those neighborhoods were: absolutely charming homes — craftsman bungalows and brown-shingle originals, gardens grown right up to the walls — from an era that never had to think about hardening, because hardening as we know it barely existed. When the firestorm was done there was nothing left to read. Just ash.
He won't tell you hardening would have saved those homes — on steep hills fire runs uphill fast, and that day it outran everything. What he'll tell you is what the research has proven since: hardened homes ignite slower and later, and slower buys the minutes firefighters never had in 1991. Nobody honest sells certainty in this work. The honest unit is odds.
Stoneridge Construction spent its first decades as a general contracting firm — remodels, additions, the trade Paul was raised in. As the hills changed — the insurance letters, the new codes, the Octobers that feel different now — the work he'd been thinking about since 1991 became the flagship. Not because fire is the business; because the homes are. The mission has never been complicated: put the odds in people's favor.
One small thing about the name: Amaral is Portuguese for a grove of trees. A man named for the landscape, building homes to live alongside it.
The Amarals — three generations built this company, and the fourth earned its way in. Marco holds a construction management degree from Cal Poly; Danny came up through the tools to a contractor's license of his own; Teresa, a certified wildfire mitigation specialist, runs the assessment program. The tradition continues the only way it ever has: on quality.
The Reasons That Survive a Hard Question
Trust isn't a paragraph — it's a set of habits you can check. These are ours.
Builders, Not Salespeople
Your walk-around is led by a Stoneridge project lead — someone who builds for a living, not a commissioned rep. And every roadmap is reviewed and signed by Paul before it reaches you.
Licensed & Accountable
Class B California general contractor — licensed, bonded, insured. Trusted subs, one point of accountability, one signature on the line.
No Fireproof Promises
Nobody can make your home fireproof, and we'll never say otherwise. We make it a much harder target, to Chapter 7A standards, and show our math.
The Assessment Is a Deliverable
It's a paid engagement with a written roadmap you keep — whoever you build with. A free inspection is usually a pitch; ours is a document.
Every Phase Is Documented
Photo-and-spec reports as work completes, built for your insurance file — because the proof matters as much as the plywood.
We Live Here Too
Stoneridge builds in the hills its crews drive home to. The standards we work to are the ones we'd want on our own street — because they are.
Start With the Assessment.
Request a time and we'll confirm — then walk your property with you, Zone Zero to roofline, and hand you the roadmap Paul signed.
Request a Hardening Assessment