Bald Hill Builders is a women-owned general contractor and construction manager based in Walpole, Mass., founded by Brenda Laurenza. It works mostly around Greater Boston, with a book weighted toward affordable and multifamily housing plus healthcare, education, retail and historic preservation jobs. The firm’s an open shop and says it’s bonded to $150 million, which puts it in the mid-size tier. Its standout job is Betty Greene Apartments in Jackson Square, a 65-unit, six-story Passive House building for Urban Edge that ENR named 2026 East Best Project for Residential/Hospitality. Bald Hill ran interim blower-door tests throughout construction instead of waiting for the final one, a habit other housing builders should borrow.
Forty-five people are listed on Bald Hill’s team page, six of them in a leadership group: Brenda Laurenza as Founder and President, Matthew Grosshandler as VP of Operations, Nathan Ploughman as Director of Construction, Todd Small as General Superintendent, John DeRuosi as Controller and Stacy Holyoke as Senior Manager of HR and Administration. That is a full management bench for a firm of this size, and it is the structure behind the $150 million bonding capacity.
The market mix is broader than the housing work it is best known for. Planned communities, affordable housing, senior living and multifamily sit in one group. Commercial covers corporate interiors and cannabis facilities — the latter named as its own market, which few Greater Boston general contractors do explicitly. Institutional covers academic and healthcare, and hospitality covers restaurants, retail and hotels.
The project list reads like a tour of Boston’s neighborhoods and inner suburbs. Affordable and planned community work includes St. Therese in Everett, 157-163 Chestnut Street and 170 Cottage Street in Chelsea, and 31 Tufts Street in Boston. Multifamily and mixed-use includes Oriole Landing in Lincoln, 1599 Columbus in Roxbury, Four Corners in Dorchester and office space at 4228 Washington. On the institutional side the firm built the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston and the locker room at Northeastern University’s Marino Center. It has also completed Daily Table retail locations in Cambridge, Salem, Mattapan and Roxbury.
The technology stack is published, which helps a developer judge how the job will actually be administered: Procore and SmartBid for project and bid management, TimberScan with Sage 300 for accounting, and drones on site.
On delivery, the design-build service is set up for fast-tracking, with construction staff running constructability assessments during design and design staff staying involved after completion to resolve functional or quality issues. The general contracting scope is spelled out further than most: permit applications, securing the property, temporary utilities, on-site personnel management, site surveying and engineering, construction waste disposal or recycling, and schedule and cash flow monitoring. The firm handles both ground-up work and interior fit-outs, including tight sites and compressed schedules, and says a significant share of its work is repeat business.
Diversity is treated as an operating commitment rather than a page. The firm states a mission to work with and support disadvantaged subcontractors, cites a track record of jobsite diversity, and runs a Community Hiring program. For public and subsidized housing work in Massachusetts, where participation goals are part of the contract, that is a practical qualification as much as a value statement.
