An Engineer who decided to build the best quality houses
MEET MIKE CHRISTENSEN
Mike Christensen founded Peak One Builders 24 years ago. He holds a structural engineering degree, served 20 years in the U.S. Army, and has spent two decades building luxury custom homes across North Scottsdale and Paradise Valley — only a handful at a time, on purpose.
How He Builds
Built by an engineer. By hand. A few at a time.
Mike earned a structural engineering degree before he ever built a house for a living. He could have practiced engineering. He chose building instead, and he builds the way an engineer thinks: past code minimum, with the structure and the performance worked out long before the finishes.
Peak One is a design-build firm with an architectural designer on staff, Jeff Biever, so the plans and the budget come together under one roof before a contract is ever signed. And Peak One builds only a handful of homes a year — never thirty or forty. Yours is never one of a crowd.
Deep ARC experience across Desert Mountain, Paradise Valley, Rio Verde, Mirabel, Estancia, Silverleaf, Whisper Rock, and DC Ranch.
Primary build range $3M–$6M+, up to $10M+
FROM US ARMY TO THE BUILD SITE
the road here
He started as an automotive mechanic, enlisted in the Army National Guard, and studied structural engineering at Northern Illinois University while leading in ROTC. He became an infantry officer and deployed twice — Iraq/Kuwait and Afghanistan — leading a scout/sniper platoon. He came home to post-traumatic stress and a housing market collapsing in the Great Recession, and rebuilt his company anyway, through that downturn and every one since. Along the way he helped build six homes for Jared Allen’s Homes for Wounded Warriors, handing the keys to injured veterans and founded Freedom for Heroes, a 501(c)3 non-profit. The phrase he uses for all of it is “failing forward.”
BEYOND BUILDING
Every home Mike builds funds a mission.
In 2023, Mike and his wife Gina founded Freedom for Heroes, a veteran nonprofit confronting the epidemic of veteran suicide through outdoor adventure and mental-health retreats, at no cost to the veterans it serves.
The sobering fact: 22 Veterans a day take their own lives after returning to civilian life. One is too many.
The two are tied together on purpose: the homes fund the mission, and the mission is part of why Peak One builds. As Mike puts it, they’re not just building a house.