Find fish stores offering custom aquarium design, building, and installation across the United States. Browse 99 stores in 16 states with ratings, hours, and directions.
At some point, the standard 120-gallon reef-ready tank from Waterbox or Red Sea stops making sense. The living room calls for a 6-foot peninsula dividing two rooms, the office lobby needs a built-in wall unit with hidden plumbing, or you want a rimless starfire glass tank in a dimension that no manufacturer catalogs. Custom aquarium builds are where fishkeeping crosses into architecture and engineering. The stores that do this well are speccing structural loads with your contractor, routing plumbing through walls, sizing return pumps for 15-foot head pressure, and building stands from welded steel that will hold 2,000 pounds of water without a creak for the next 20 years.
Standard aquariums come in predetermined dimensions, use regular float glass with a green tint, and ship with overflow designs that prioritize manufacturing efficiency over flow optimization. Once you want a tank wider than 24 inches front-to-back, longer than 72 inches, or need a low-profile 18-inch-tall frag system that sits on a custom steel rack, you are outside of what Aqueon, Marineland, or even Red Sea offers. The limitations compound: a manufactured stand might use particleboard with a vinyl wrap that swells at the first splash, the included overflow may be a single Durso standpipe that cannot handle the flow rate your circulation plan demands, and the canopy was designed for a fixture that does not match your Orphek or Kessil array. Custom builds solve all of this at once. Starfire glass on the front and side panels for true color clarity, a coast-to-coast overflow with a Synergy shadow design for silent operation, and a stand fabricated from 1.5-inch square steel tubing with a powder-coated finish that matches your cabinetry.
A proper custom build starts months before water touches glass. The first step is a site visit where the builder assesses structural support. A 200-gallon tank with sump, rock, and sand weighs over 2,400 pounds, and most residential floors need reinforcement beneath the joists or a direct post to the foundation. Electrical comes next: you need dedicated 20-amp circuits for the return pump, heaters, lighting, and controller, plus GFCI protection within six feet of the tank. The plumbing plan covers supply lines for an RO/DI unit and a drain for water changes, which saves you from hauling buckets across hardwood floors. Then the actual tank design: acrylic or glass, bracing strategy, overflow style (Herbie dual-standpipe, Bean Animal triple-pipe, or a custom ghost overflow machined into the back panel). The sump gets designed around your filtration goals: refugium section for chaetomorpha, skimmer chamber sized for your Reef Octopus or Nyos model, and a probe holder section for your Apex pH, temp, and ORP probes. Stands are fabricated to the millimeter, with leveling feet, access panels, and often integrated fans for heat management.
The tank filling with water is not the finish line. That is where the relationship between you and the builder actually matters. Good custom shops provide a break-in period of support that includes cycling the system, dialing in flow rates on the returns and powerheads, calibrating the ATO and dosing pumps, and programming the lighting schedule with a proper ramp-up and actinic sunset. They should return after the first week to check for micro-leaks at plumbing unions, verify the overflow is handling full flow without gurgling, and confirm the heater is maintaining temp within half a degree. Many builders also offer ongoing maintenance contracts that make sense given they know every fitting and pipe run in the system. Before signing with any custom builder, ask to see three completed installations that are at least a year old and still running. Ask those clients about warranty claims, response time when something leaked or a stand needed adjustment, and whether the builder helped source livestock and aquascaping rock. A builder who disappears after the check clears is not someone you want responsible for 300 gallons of saltwater sitting above your living room ceiling.