Let us tell you our story,

From the beginning...

My wife and I were having a baby, and we'd decided we didn't want to raise her in front of cartoons in a little room all day. We wanted to give her fresh air, sunshine, butterflies, birds, flowers, all the magic the natural world has to offer! And my wife and I love being reminded we are children of the Earth ourselves. We stare at screens enough at work, we just wanted an outside space to nest in with our daughter. We didn't want our focus on noisy TV when she took her first steps, we wanted a sanctuary in the sunlight.

So we looked online at a few different pergola places. None of them would list a price! Both my wife and I are commercial architects who design office buildings and skyscrapers, and we figured, it's just a patio cover, it can't be that much. So we called up the website we liked most and they still wouldn't tell us a price, they told us they had to send someone out to our home to look at our backyard. As I mentioned, both my wife and I work (she was still going into the office at six months along), so coordinating a meeting was a little bit of a hassle. But we made the time and met up with him.

Wow that guy could talk! He let us know everything that went into making a pergola and discussed infinite options. As architects, it really didn't seem that difficult, so we kept trying to ask how much and he wouldn't even give us a ballpark. He needed to know all the options we wanted first and once we chose everything he said he'd send us a quote. We heard all about his family and how they like their pergola, and he was here for over an hour, but we still didn't know how much it would be. Finally, that evening, we received a quote for over 100,000K!

We couldn't believe it. We didn't even know how to respond it was so absurd. We weren't trying to buy another house, we just wanted a covered area in our backyard where we could get some shade while sitting on furniture. It wasn't even that we didn't have the money, we simply understood it wasn't worth what they were asking.

We contacted other pergola businesses but they wanted to build with wood and other materials that weren't fire safe, or they asked so much of our time and we had so much going on between our careers and a baby on the way. I started thinking about just building one myself. I started trying to figure out how to source the parts and I began to learn that it was clear that half the cost, or more, of the pergola was the salesmen who were trying to spend so much time with us we felt guilted into buying from them at some ridiculous markup.

So I worked from a simple sketch, and my wife and I designed our own pergola. Through our contacts at work we were able to source the best extruded aluminum out there, and build it out with the best components. Once we had all the parts, when my wife was 9 months pregnant, I spent my weekend setting it up and it looked great! I turned on the fan, put our new sofa next to the baby swing and got it all ready to show my wife, but when I went in to get her she had just gone into labor!

Well, long story short, when we got home from the hospital it felt so wonderful to bring her out back with our new baby Emma and sit on our couch in the shade, with the sun kissing the two best girls in my world. Our pergola instantly became the new heart of our home, where time slows to a baby crawl, and every breath of fresh air is healing and good.

Once our daughter grew and we decided to grow our family more we went ahead and sold our home to move into a bigger one. That's when it really hit home that the pergola we'd designed was an incredible investment. Our home was worth so much more because of our pergola we were able to buy a much larger home without spending a dime! We designed an even bigger pergola for our new home and soon our friends were asking us to design them pergolas as well.

My wife and I loved our careers with our firm, we had never thought about leaving and starting our own pergola company! But we thought about all the other families getting the runaround from middlemen. We realized there are really only a few pergola companies out there and it was plain to see they're taking advantage of the supply and demand ratio. We talked about how we could build prepackaged solutions so busy families like ours could simply choose which pergola makes sense for them and click "buy now" rather than go through all the hassle we did. We dreamed of offering pergolas with the most reasonable pricing possible, because we know your family's budget isn't something to be exploited. We understand the value of spending time outside with your family in these computer-driven times, and we believe every family should have an outdoor sanctuary in your home.

We'd had a relationship with Medical Breakthrough because our firm used their Medical Massage Chairs, and our friends raved about their Medical Saunas, so when we decided to take our ideas to them they immediately saw the potential of helping people live healthier lives, and it was a perfect fit. They had architects they'd worked with to build their saunas and other award-winning solutions, and we had our contacts, so together, we created Breakthrough Engineering - a breakthrough in pergola solutions. We are so proud to present our pergolas to you, and we're so excited you can now afford the highest quality pergola with all the added features you could imagine. We've made it easy to change your whole life with a few clicks.