Then Jo mentioned to me that she’d like to live in a place like Castle Heights someday, and I figured, “Well, maybe we could get into one of those houses that’s a bit of a fixer-upper. We could live there and renovate it and flip it for a much higher profit than we do these little student-housing-type homes.” It sounded like a bigger risk going in, but I was confident we’d be able to get a bigger return on the back end, so it really wasn’t any more of a risk than what we were doing with the smaller homes. I worked out the numbers in my head and said, “Why not?”
I truly thought it would take years of savings and discipline for us to get into a house in that neighborhood. But just a few months after I closed the shop, Chip stumbled onto an opportunity to pick up a gorgeous 1920s Tudor-style house in Castle Heights. The interior was outdated, and the exterior had been neglected. The curb appeal just wasn’t there. We’d been living in such small homes that to us the place looked like a mansion. But to people used to living in nicer, bigger houses, it looked like a nightmare. So the owners had priced it right. Thankfully, we had enough cash for a down payment, and at that point we had the credit it would take to make the house ours.
With four babies, we figured it wasn’t a great idea to live in a house and renovate it at the same time. So we did the renovations on that Castle Heights home quickly, before we moved into it—and the impression we made was instant. The neighbors couldn’t believe how good the exterior looked after just a couple of months.
All we did was paint the exterior and rework the landscaping, but it drew all sorts of attention. Apparently nobody had thought to apply the same sort of fast-moving, flipping-a-house-style renovation ethic to homes in that neighborhood. We did things right. We did quality work. We just did things quickly because that’s what we were used to doing.
When you’re flipping homes, there are seasons to it. There are times of the year when things sell and times of the year when they don’t, and so you get into this schedule of working overtime so you won’t lose your shot at making any money. The longer you hold something, the more the interest on the loan will eat into your profit.
Jo and I used to make little bets with each other about how fast we could work. She would say, “You did the floors in two days on that last house. I bet you can do it in one this time!” I’d stay up sanding until two in the morning just to make the bet—and argue that it still counted as the same day.
At the same time that we were renovating the Castle Heights house, things were kind of picking up everywhere for Magnolia Homes. We built our first houses in town, and people were in line to come to our open houses. People were just so taken with Jo’s designs that they would come to the open houses even when they had no interest in buying a house. They just wanted to talk to us. “We’ve got this kitchen, and man, it needs some help. We don’t know what to do. Is there any chance we can get you to do our remodel?” We would leave open houses and walk down the block to meet with people who were almost begging us to come do work for them.
It all happened quickly. We seemed to unleash some sort of lightning in a bottle when we started working this deal together.
I was able to do 90 percent of that work from home too. I would hire a babysitter and go out to see a property or check on a job site for a couple of hours here or there in any given week. But I could do all of the actual designing without leaving my kids by using photographs of the location and a sketch pad—and eventually incorporating some design software that I taught myself how to use on the computer. The fact that I was all of a sudden able to do that work from a thirty-six-hundred-square-foot dream home in Castle Heights just seemed beyond imagination. I was in heaven!
Nearly every house in that neighborhood was like a one-of-a-kind work of art. There were homes with grand pillars next to more modern, midcentury homes next to Tudor-style homes next to bungalows built in the twenties and thirties. Just looking out from our new front porch provided me with all sorts of inspiration. And inside our home, I let my inspiration run wild.
I poured everything I had learned up to that point into that house. I had taken to looking at all sorts of architecture and home magazines, and I wanted my home to be worthy of that kind of attention.
So much of what made that house special, however, had nothing to do with what I could do to it. In fact, the best thing I could do for it was to let its character and history come back to life. The reality is that old houses that were built a hundred years ago were built by actual craftsmen, people who were the best in the world at what they did. The little nuances in the woodwork, the framing of the doors, the built-in nooks, the windows—all had been done by smart, talented people, and I quickly found that uncovering those details and all of that character made the house more inviting and more attractive and more alive.
A lot of modern houses in the suburbs are big and beautiful, and I don’t want to run anyone down, but when you look closely, it’s almost like a beautiful woman with a little too much makeup on. Our Castle Heights home seemed to just get more and more beautiful the more Jo wiped the makeup away.
Mixing the old and the new, bringing our own sense of history into the home—that became really important to me. I think there’s something about things from the past that just calls to us, that triggers a kind of longing. Sometimes you look at a piece of furniture or an old clock or a piece of artwork—whatever it might be—and you’re just drawn to it. You think, Why do I love that piece? Well, chances are it’s because it reminds you of something—something from history, something from childhood, maybe even something you lost. This can be true whether the piece is extremely unique and one-of-a-kind or just plain classic.
Take subway tile, for example. Subway tile is the most basic, affordable product in the world. It’s not a high-end type of material. But you go into any bakery that ever inspired you—maybe one in France—or you look behind the counters in some cool old restaurant, and what do you see on the walls? Subway tile. You look at old pictures of the New York subway system or delis and coffee shops from a hundred years ago that just draw your eye and make you long for a simpler time, and there it is.
Putting those tiles in a home just works for me. They’ll never go out of style. They’ll never seem dated. And the more time I spent in that old house in Castle Heights, the more that notion sank into my heart and showed itself in my work.
It’s funny how people will get caught up in trends. It’s almost like the shag carpet thing in the seventies. People who put it in their houses weren’t thinking, Hey, let’s go be dumb. They were thinking, This is great. It’s gorgeous! But there are just a lot of trends that come and go, and what Jo was aiming us toward was setting a standard that’s the complete opposite of trendy.
Why would I want to encourage my client to use the new hot color when I know that in a year or two she’ll need to paint the walls again just to get rid of it? I wouldn’t want to do that in my own home. I wouldn’t want to waste all that time and money.
I suppose we could have gone in the other direction. I mean, we’re businesspeople, right? Why wouldn’t we convince the customer to do the hot new color? Then we’d be back every year or two going, “Oh, you’re not still doing that orange we talked about last year, are you? That’s so outdated. Here, we can give you the newest green for $10,000.”
That’s just not who we are. And honestly, I’m a creature of habit. I’ve done my makeup the same way since I was thirteen, and I’ve always had long hair. I think I’ve just always liked classic. The Castle Heights house sort of focused me in on it more in terms of design, but in personality I was always that way. I find something I like and I stick with it. Ironically, that’s how Chip is too. He’s worn the same brand of boots since we married, the same brand of jeans since we married, the same old basic white shirt since we married.