Meet The Team
The Brains Behind Our Operations
The building process is not perfect, and neither are we. However, we aspire to build our buyers high-performance homes using the greatest attention to detail and the peak standards of design from the most talented individuals in our industry. Meet the people behind the scenes making that happen.
Jonathan Ortega
Jonathan is the founder of Merriment Homes. A fond believer of experiential learning, he grew up building things and has always had a knack for construction and architecture. In 2012, shortly after obtaining his MBA from DePaul University, and eager to combine his academic prowess with his real world experience in real estate and finance, he set out to take on his first project. He quickly scaled what he learned from those first few projects to what Merriment Homes is today: A premiere spec builder of luxury homes in the city of Chicago and surrounding areas. On his free time, Jonathan still enjoys woodworking and riffing on his acoustic guitar.
President of Operations/ Founder
Lilliana Ortega
Lilliana is Merriment Homes’ lead designer and trend setter. She fearlessly takes risks with our home’s layouts and interior designs and as a result our homes are often highly featured and referenced by other builders and agents in the area. She is an expert at seamlessly fusing transitional architecture with a modern flare. Lilliana’s attention to detail helps us create semi-custom equivalent homes that stand in stark contrast to the ubiquitous cookie cutter homes found in the surrounding areas. In her spare time, Lilliana enjoys traveling on family trips (she just visited her 60th country!) and spoiling our intern pup, Gizmo.
Lead Designer / Founder
Jaime Garcia
Jaime joined the Merriment team in 2017. After a successful career in the operations side of academia, it was time for him to fully unleash his potential value-add to an organization. Jaime handles the day-to-day operations of all project sites, manages budgets to ensure we stay within our standard deviations, and juggles the overlapping schedules and timelines to ensure we complete our projects faster than industry standards. He is the navigation compass that orients us all. On his free time, Jaime enjoys taking his camper into the wilderness with his two young sons and wife.
VP of Operations
Feras Abbas
Feras is a pivotal component to Merriment Homes’ marketing and sales strategies. We trust in his expertise as an award-winning licensed realtor to price our homes competitively and because of his innovative approach to social media marketing, it’s not uncommon for Feras to have multiple buyers lined up for a property long before completion! This allows us to stay nimble and pivot quickly to a new project in the current dynamic real estate market. When not busy showing our homes to perspective buyers, Feras enjoys traveling to new destinations where he can experience the many cultures our beautiful planet has to offer.
Director of Marketing and Sales
Joshua Ortega
As our most recent addition, Joshua helps with various aspects of the operations side of the business. A core component to our organization, Joshua helps fill in the gaps and reduce redundancies among different departments. Whether that’s creating a robust scheduling system or shoring up deficiencies in our excel spreadsheets, there is no task too big or small for Joshua to tackle. When he’s not hunting down the delivery of a plumbing fixture, Joshua is busy studying Finance as a full-time student at Syracuse University. Joshua also enjoys rooting for his hometown Chicago Bulls, keeping up with international affairs, and continuing his love for travel with a trip to Japan coming up soon.
Operations Assistant
Joel Garcia
Merriment Homes relies on Joel for all of our project’s site maintenance. You will find him on our sites daily. People are often surprised to learn how much debris is created from building a home. Joel takes pride in creating the clean working environment that is pivotal to the safety and efficiency of all our Merriment Homes staff and subcontractors. On the weekends, Joel enjoys teeing off an 18-hole round of golf.
Site Maintenance Manager
Gizmo
Meet Gizmo, our team mascot. He’s our go to four-legged consultant for all our pet conscious designs. You’ll frequently find him on jobsites happily testing out our latest doggy houses and showers. While small in stature his big personality fills any room with love and laughter. He’s the perfect stress reliever for this hectic industry. Follow his adventures here.
Intern Pup
Mission
Our mission is pretty simple, build homes that we would be proud to live in ourselves. With that in mind we strive for the following guiding principles.
This means deploying best practices in all of our safety and hazardous protocols with both our end buyers, but also our subcontractors and workers in mind.
This means being conscious of the communities where we build, neighbors, suppliers, the environment, and our subcontractors and tradespeople.
This often means using higher quality materials, going above and beyond minimum municipal code requirements, and creating effective feedback loop mechanisms to improve and monitor quality control.
To us, this means pricing our properties fairly. We consider the quality of materials and final product we are delivering when calculating price, while not heavily relying on opportunistic temporary shifts in the real estate market.