Second story additions in Ortega

Ortega sits on a peninsula wrapped by the St. Johns and Ortega rivers, laid out as one of Jacksonville's earliest planned neighborhoods, and almost everything about it is finished — the street grid, the canopy, the mix of Mediterranean Revival, Colonial Revival, Tudor, and frame vernacular houses that put Old Ortega on the National Register. You cannot make more Ortega. Which is precisely why families who own here rarely want to trade a peninsula address for square footage in a subdivision: the lot is the thing you cannot buy again.

A second story is how an Ortega house grows without giving any of that up. And there is a meaningful technical point in this neighborhood's favor: Old Ortega's National Register listing is honorary at the city level — it is not one of Jacksonville's locally designated districts, so no Certificate of Appropriateness is required. The design bar that matters here is aesthetic, not bureaucratic: a second story on a 1920s Mediterranean or Tudor has to be drawn so the finished house reads as if it were always two stories, from the roofline to the window proportions.

The engineering is house-by-house. Ortega's original stock includes both frame and masonry construction, and whether an existing masonry first story can carry a framed second level is a structural question Brackish Builders answers with an engineer before design — along with the 130 mph wind load path Florida requires of every vertical addition in Duval County. Construction runs on the weatherproof-above-the-roof method: the new floor is built and dried-in above the existing roof before the old one is removed, so you stay in the home the whole time.

Neighborhoods we serve in Ortega

ZIP codes served: 32210