Two decades of building for clients who notice every seam.

The owner

Joel Lemke was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. The neighborhood he grew up in shaped him — Tacoma is a city that calls itself so pretty, so gritty, and that contradiction is exactly the contractor Joel has become. The work is beautiful. The path to it was hard.

Joel served in the United States Army as a 19K M1 Armor Crewman — the soldiers who operate the M1A1/M1A2 Abrams main battle tank. The tank crewman MOS is one of the most discipline-intensive enlisted positions in the modern Army. Daily mechanical inspections, ammunition handling protocols, crew coordination at speed under pressure, and the kind of attention to maintenance detail that makes a forty-ton machine reliable in conditions that destroy lesser equipment. That discipline transferred directly to running a contracting crew. It's why our job sites run the way they do.

The résumé

Joel's early career put him on a crew at the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana — one of the most exclusive private residential communities in the country. The standard for finish work there is set by clients who can afford to demand it: members include some of the most successful business leaders, athletes, and entertainers in America. The early career standard Joel learned there is the standard he's brought to every job since.

From there, golf course construction. Spanish Peaks Mountain Club in Big Sky — a Tom Weiskopf signature design ranked among the top courses in Montana. Quintero Golf Club in Peoria, Arizona — a Rees Jones design ranked top-40 public course in the United States. Superstition Springs Golf Club in Mesa. Course construction demands tolerances that residential work rarely sees — drainage engineering, earthwork, stonework, irrigation infrastructure. Bring those tolerances back to a Bellevue or Madison Park residential exterior, and you get the kind of work that doesn't need to be redone in five years.

For three years, Joel co-owned a wholesale stone warehouse in Arizona. The business model: bring in flagstone wholesale, custom-cut it in the warehouse, deliver it to crews building master-plan developments. Rockeries, water features, retaining walls, and on one notable project, every stone mailbox on the cul-de-sac. (The HOA's CCRs required them.) That experience is why our hardscape work runs at scale — we know stone procurement and installation from the supply side.

For roughly a decade, Joel worked in automotive sales and finance, much of it at Larson Auto Group selling Porsche and Audi. Larson is one of the largest dealer groups on the West Coast, and Joel was selling to the same Pacific Northwest clientele he now builds for. He understands them not as customers in the abstract but as people he has sat across from for hours, talking through six-figure decisions. Joel still owns and drives the 1986 black Porsche 911 he bought in those years.

He came home to Tacoma to build the way he was trained — for clients who notice every seam, with crews that hold the standard, on a license that's bonded and insured the way Washington State requires.

The company

Big Star General Contracting was founded in 2024. The license is WA L&I #BIGSTSG760LQ. The bond is #538556V. The company is a registered Veteran-Owned business. We work across nine residential exterior disciplines — custom homes, roofing, decks, hardscape, concrete, fences, gates, pole barns, and gutters — plus pre-sale renovation for listing agents working stale luxury inventory.

Every project is run by Joel personally. There is no subcontracted oversight, no rotating site supervisors, and no lowest-bid corner-cutting on materials. We are a CertainTeed Authorized Partner for roofing, which means we install the product with the strongest warranty in the industry on roofs that the warranty actually covers. Our gutter truck means we fabricate seamless gutters on-site, color-matched to your home, with no pre-fab seams that fail in five winters. Our hardscape and concrete work is done at golf-course-construction tolerances. Our deck work is done to manufacturer spec for the premium composite materials we install.

We are not the cheapest contractor in the South Sound. We are the contractor who shows up with twenty years of résumé behind every decision and a discipline that makes the work last.

The publication

Big Star is the publisher of Cascade Fairway, a quarterly publication on residential craft, place, and material in the Pacific Northwest. Cascade Fairway is independent in editorial voice. We support it because the standard of residential work in the PNW has been undocumented at the trade-craft level for too long. The publication is free. Subscribe at cascadefairway.com.

Ready to start?

Book your on-site project consultation on Joel's calendar. Or send us a note if you have questions first.