When House Beautiful chose us to build its 2020 Whole Home Concept House, we had no idea how closely its design would predict what buyers would want after the pandemic.
Each spring, House Beautiful hands one builder in the country the keys to its national Whole Home Concept House, a chance to pair a single construction team with a roster of the country's leading interior designers, each given a room to reimagine on their own terms.
For the magazine's third annual edition, and its first in Colorado, that builder was us.
We didn't know it yet, but the home we were about to build, a 5,424-square-foot walkout ranch on two acres in Fox Hill, would unveil just months into a pandemic that reshaped exactly what families wanted from a house. Every room had to answer a question no one had thought to ask a year earlier: what does a home need to feel safe, spacious, and quietly luxurious all at once?
The eleven designers on this project never spoke with each other during the design phase. Each one worked from photographs of the empty shell and a short brief, trusting that somehow, at the end, it would all come together into a single coherent home rather than eleven disconnected rooms stitched at the hallway.
“Buyers are overwhelmingly wanting work-from-home space, room for extended family, and a healthier home environment now, and this house was designed around exactly that.”
Building for eleven visions at once
Our job wasn't just construction. It was building a canvas flexible enough for more than a dozen independent design visions, from a treehouse-inspired dining room to a great room anchored by a floor-to-ceiling fireplace, while keeping the whole thing buildable, cohesive, and ready for a national launch deadline.
The result sold for $2,750,000 and became the first home in the nation fully certified by Wellness Within Your Walls.
