Visitors and residents of Ford’s Colony may have recognized one of the very first homes in the neighborhood from the pages of Southern Living Magazine.
The home earned Wayne Harbin Builder the Southern Living 2015 Builder Member of the Year award. It currently serves as a showcase home for the builder, who has participated in the prestigious Southern Living Custom Builders Program since 2002.
“The program is not something that you request to be in,” Harbin said. “You get a telephone call from them to be interviewed to see if they’ll accept you into the program. They look at your integrity as a builder. You’ve got to give them numerous people to talk to in order to make sure that you have a good rapport with the people for which you build and that you have character in the community that you build in.”
The program holds the builders accountable to their community by requiring they follow certain guidelines.
“You’ve got to do it all the time, not just some of the time,” Harbin said. “So when a customer comes to us, they know that we’re a part of this Southern Living program. They know that the banks will back us, that the local inspectors know who we are, that we’re in good standing with the community.”
The company may be named after Harbin, but has become a family business. Harbin works with his wife, Bonnie, and sons, Doug and Brad. They built the home at 109 Ford’s Colony Drive to demonstrate craftsmanship, flow and function.
Starting with a Southern Living building plan called “Harrison Place,” the team looked for ways to customize the home and improve the layout where they could, like turning the porch off the living room into an outdoor kitchen.
In the master bathroom, they went beyond “his” and “hers” sinks and closets by building a shower open on two sides, accessible from either “his” or “her” side of the bathroom. Harbin calls it “the car wash,” since you can walk right through it.
Even though the team started with Southern Living’s building plans, they had a lot of decisions to make both inside and out. They called in an interior designer to assist with certain choices.
Details weren’t spared. The four bedroom, 2 ½ bath home features such upgrades as elaborate millwork, Ferguson plumbing fixtures, Hunter Douglas remote-controlled screens, gas-powered exterior light fixtures, a built-in gift-wrapping station and even a dog-washing station in the garage. Special touches like a beadboard ceiling, mercury glass cabinet fronts in the living room and glass doorknobs give the home a custom, beachy feel.
The home also boasts technological upgrades. Lighting, air conditioning and the locks can be controlled via tablet or smartphone app. A TV screen is integrated into the mirror of one of the bathroom vanities.
The builder chose energy-efficient appliances and money-saving systems.
“If you’re going to build something like this you want to be able to make it very economical,” Harbin said. “The payback is going to be so much quicker by spending that kind of money.”
Even though in the beginning the team at Harbin Harbin Builder didn’t know the home was going to be in the running for the Southern Living award, all of their thoughtful decisions paid off.
Harbin recalls when they found out they had won, beating out the other hundred-plus builders also in the program, and that they’d be featured in the pages of the national magazine.
“We were elated,” he said. “It makes you feel awfully good that somebody feels as good about the house as you do. We were tickled. Very tickled.”
To learn more about the home, click here.
Where We Live is a weekly feature looking at homes in the Historic Triangle. Do you have a home, on or off the market, that our readers may be interested in seeing? Let us know at WYD@WYDaily.com.
