Mike Speciale

Who is Mike Speciale

Mike Speciale builds things you can stand inside. He owns Sett Studio, an Austin design and build firm, alongside his wife and co-owner Bristal Speciale, who runs operations and is a licensed real estate agent. In a room full of software, services and capital, he represents the physical trades, the discipline of turning drawings into finished buildings on a budget and a schedule.

He has more than twenty years in residential and commercial construction behind him, and one line in his history explains a lot about how he runs a luxury build firm: before this he was the construction director for Habitat for Humanity in Austin. He learned to build on the job where the budget is other people's donations and the client has never owned a home before.

Sett Studio

Sett Studio is a design and build firm based in Austin. Its work spans custom luxury home construction, land and site development, speculative homes, interior design, and multi-family development. It is a full-stack operation in the literal sense: the same firm can take a project from raw land through design and permitting to a finished, occupied home.

Beyond Austin

The firm has grown past its home market. Sett Studio bought four and a half acres in Nashville's Green Hills neighborhood from the Martin family for $4 million in August 2022 and is developing Martin Reserve there: ten single-story mid-century modern homes, between 3,500 and 6,000 square feet, floor to ceiling glass, designed with Dick Clark and Associates, starting around $3.5 million each.

Taking a build operation into a new city is its own kind of scaling problem and nothing like adding seats to a software company. The subcontractors are different, the inspectors are different, the buyers want something different, and every one of those relationships has to be rebuilt from nothing. His read on Nashville was simple: the product Austin takes for granted was not being built there.

It's something the Nashville market hasn't necessarily seen yet. Here in Austin, it's something we just do.

The record

The proof in his business is not a case study deck, it is a review count. Sett Studio holds a 4.6 out of 5 across roughly seventy client reviews on Houzz and has collected thirteen Houzz awards, with Best of Houzz design recognition running across more than a decade, plus a Best of Austin nod in 2015 for green building design. In a trade where the common story is a builder who went quiet halfway through, a decade of repeat recognition is the whole argument.

The firm and its work have been featured in Builder Architect Magazine, Dwell, Inc., Forbes and the Austin Chronicle, picked up an HGTV Fresh Faces of Design nomination in 2015, and Speciale presented for the City of Austin's first SMART Home and green building community initiative. Sustainability in a custom home is usually a line in a brochure. He was in the room when the city was writing the program.

A maker in the room

Speciale hosts two podcasts. Building Cool Sh!t covers the trade and the business of development, and Unbound Living is about deliberately pushing past your own comfort zone, which is a different subject only on paper. He brings a builder's eye to conversations that can otherwise drift abstract. Sett Studio is a sponsor and host partner of Network of Directors, so his connection to the room runs deeper than a single appearance. He is part of the infrastructure that makes it happen.