Founder, President and Hamptons construction expert, Nicholas Alimanestianu was the second of four children of Mihai Alimanestianu and Ioana Fulga, who were political refugees fleeing Communist Romania after World War II. His father, a talented mechanical engineer, got a job building the national network of gas pipelines in Houston. When Nicholas was two years old, his father received funding to pursue his invention for automated parking garages, so the family moved to New York.
Nicholas has always been fascinated with the construction of houses. As a child, he recalls building dozens of tree houses and other play houses out of a variety of materials such as straw, twigs, tar paper and discarded lumber. One summer in central France he made an all-bamboo house. When he was an engineering student at NYU, he constructed his first house, a three room Gambrel A-Frame, in the woods on his parents’ property. Though somewhat basic (a tank in the basement collected rain water and it was heated with firewood) he moved in and started a family there. Before starting the construction company in Southampton he was involved with a housing development in Florida and worked on a new railroad project in Central Africa.
Nicolas attended high school in Switzerland and spent one year in a business school in San Francisco. The business atmosphere didn’t appeal to him. “Everything’s geared towards maximizing profits and money,” he said about the experience. He switched majors, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in civil engineering from New York University.
He relocated to Southampton, N.Y. in 1984 where he started a construction company called "Nicholas Alimanestianu Inc.” dedicated to the design, renovation, restoration and construction of luxury custom homes. Fourteen years later the company added “Southampton Building Corporation” to its name.