Business View Magazine Feb 2023

66 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2 “You can see a photo that somebody likes, but they might not like everything in the photo, they might just like a couple of things,” Blair explains. “So it’s important to understand what they’re actually drawn to and understand that there’s not necessarily one style that you have to stay within. If someone is drawn to a farmhouse feel, that doesn’t mean that they also can’t have modern elements or mid-century elements, or anything else. “It’s understanding what they’re drawn to and why and then it’s our job to blend those together throughout the house to make sure that the final design is cohesive and makes sense to them. One of the things that we’ve always strived for is not to have our own style, but to simply be a facilitator to make it all come together.” One of Spruce Homes’ current projects is an infill home where the clients are partial to three different design styles – modern, mountain rustic, and a bit of farmhouse. They’ve taken those three different styles and turned them into a cohesive design that suits their client’s tastes. SPRUCE HOMES “(Our homes) are really client-motivated,” says Spruce Homes owner Brad Blair. “We try to blend different design styles so that when our clients walk into their home, it screams the personality of our clients and the house is really unique to them. “I always say that we want our houses to have personality, we don’t want them to be bland. But we also don’t want somebody to walk down the street and be like ‘Oh, Spruce Homes built that house.” Blair and his wife started Spruce Homes in 2016, and in those early years, the company was focused on flipping houses. From there, they expanded into infill construction, which involves tearing down older, unusable homes in established neighborhoods and replacing them with a new build. “The opportunity for infill construction came mainly because we were flipping houses,” Blair recalls. “When you’re working in that world, you’re working in those older, established neighborhoods on older houses that need some major repair work, and those two worlds just collided.” Soon they had people asking to build new homes using floor plans they had used in the past and to help select finishes like tile, flooring, paint colors, and more. “So that turned us from like a spec builder to a semi-custom builder and then from there it morphed over the next couple of years to complete customs,” Blair says. “Then we started to go outside of infill neighborhoods and into building acreages and have built a couple of houses in new developments.” Today, the company focuses its efforts on large-scale renovations – a nod to where they started, says Blair, as well as full custom homes from scratch. They work hand-in-hand with clients to do everything from lot selection and floor plan creation to interior design. Each project design is different and catered to the client’s unique wants, needs, and styles. They start by having clients research inspiration they are attracted to and then they discuss what it is about those photos the clients like.