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About

One team,
one house.

Vantara exists because of a problem we both watched happen over and over from opposite sides of it.

Jennifer would design something beautiful and watch it get cut apart at bid. Josh would walk buyers through remodels where the money had clearly gone into the wrong rooms.

Same failure, two vantage points: design decisions and cost decisions were being made by people who never spoke to each other.

So we put them in the same practice.

An entry hall with white oak floors, warm plaster walls and a tall steel window casting a long rectangle of light across the floor.
Jennifer Lipman, co-founder of Vantara Homes & Design

Jennifer Lipman

Co-founder · Design

Jennifer began her career in Los Angeles in 2010, then came home to Santa Cruz and launched Bebe Grace Interiors in 2016. As the firm grew it became Dwelling Interiors & Design Studio, where she spent years designing homes across this county.

Her approach is hands-on and unfussy. She is interested in rooms that are sophisticated and genuinely livable at the same time — which sounds easy and is not. The test she applies is whether a space still works on an ordinary Tuesday morning, not just in a photograph.

She believes a home should be a personal sanctuary. In practice that means designing around how you actually live rather than how a magazine says you should.

Built work from Bebe Grace and Dwelling is available on request.

Josh Bacorn, co-founder of Vantara Homes & Design

Josh Bacorn

Co-founder · Build & Market

Santa Cruz local, dad of four, and the real estate and construction side of Vantara.

Josh spent over a decade selling homes here before doing something agents are not supposed to do: he left. For six years he built businesses instead — launching products, marketing brands, managing projects from rough sketch to finished, shipped, real. Those years taught him more about budgets, timelines, negotiation, and follow-through than any number of open houses ever could.

The scale behind that: more than half a billion dollars in home sales over the course of his career, across Santa Cruz County, Santa Clara County and Georgia — some brokered for clients, some as a principal in his own partnerships. Those partnerships have bought, renovated and resold over a hundred houses, and built three more from the ground up on spec.

That second line is the one that matters on a project like yours. A hundred-plus times, Josh has been on the ownership side of a renovation — setting the budget, absorbing the overruns, and then finding out at resale exactly what the market thought of the result. It is an expensive way to learn which decisions hold their value. It is also why he can tell you before you spend the money rather than after.

Then he came home. Because everything he loves about building companies — solving hard problems, turning an idea into something you can actually stand inside of — was waiting for him in houses all along.

He brings the market knowledge and the construction project management that turn Jennifer's vision into a finished home: on budget, on time, and worth it.

When he is not working, he is with his wife Brittany and their four kids, doing the Santa Cruz thing — beach days, trail rides, and trying to keep up.

Josh Bacorn · California DRE #01884101

How we are set up

Plainly stated.

Vantara Homes & Design provides interior design and construction management. We are not a licensed general contractor. The construction work on your project is performed by our licensed general contractor partners, and we will tell you exactly who that is before you sign anything.

We think that arrangement is a strength — you get design and project management from people whose only job is your project, and skilled licensed builders doing what they do best. But you should know how it works rather than find out later.

Josh holds an active California real estate salesperson licence, DRE #01884101. That informs the market perspective we bring to your project. Vantara's services are design and construction management.

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to meet you.

Thinking about a home here — reimagining one, adding to one, or building something new in the back yard? Let's talk.

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