Gardner Fenton Goetze is Our Collective Edge’s general contractor. A California-licensed builder, designer and permaculture practitioner with more than twenty years delivering residential, commercial and regenerative design build projects across Northern California. He founded GFG Design/Build, an accredited firm that brings craftsmanship, architectural design, engineering coordination and an artist’s eye into the same conversation.
He studied design, architecture and visual arts at California College of the Arts, sound engineering at Expression College for Digital Arts, and ecological design at Ecoversity, where he earned his permaculture design certificate under Steven Brooks and Penny Livingston.
His work includes helping lead the restoration and reopening of Record Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, a cultural landmark and one of the premier recording studios in America, across 2020 to 2025. He is currently developing a forty-acre regenerative demonstration farm in Grass Valley, built around fire-resilient design, ecological restoration, sustainable homesteading and permaculture education. That farm is Sunstone, the homestead development on the collective’s current board: the method being built at full scale on his own ground, by the person who holds the licence to build it anywhere else.
He starts every project from the belief that the client is the visionary, and that his job is to listen closely enough to find that vision and then build it. Design build, in his hands, is not construction with drawings attached. It is the making of places that are functional and beautiful at once, where every decision answers to time, materials, budget and the land.
He describes his aim as work that feels as though it has always belonged: old-world craftsmanship, modern engineering and regenerative design together, in a world that increasingly builds to be thrown away. Construction, in his words, should be quiet, collaborative and enjoyable, and should honour the people, the land, and whoever inherits the building.
Within Our Collective Edge, Gardner is the reason a California client can buy the build and not only the drawings. A licence that covers the whole state, a build team that travels, and a permaculture background that means the plan does not have to be explained to him.