August 03, 2015

Vesta’s Home Show Features Designs You Can Live With

Visitors to the spring Vesta Home Show at Spring Creek Ranch near Collierville can admire the seven luxury homes open for the tour all they want.

But they can’t buy one.

"All seven houses are already sold and I can’t remember ever a time that we have done that before," said Don Caylor, Vesta chairman.

The show, presented by the Memphis Area Home Builders Association, runs Saturday through May 13.

The Spring Creek Ranch subdivision at Collierville-Arlington Road and Raleigh-LaGrange Road is on the Spring Creek Golf Club, a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course.

Vesta’s first sell-out is also the first show for interior designer Lisa Hood co-owner of First Fruit Collection in Collierville.

She styled the interiors for builder Eric Tucker of Inglewood Homes.

"We put in lots of details, from the sunken game room to the beams in the hearth room to the stacked stone fireplace, and Lisa has made it livable," Tucker said.

Hood started on the project last year and has been included in the selection of every detail from lighting to cabinets to countertops.

"We got involved when the slab was poured," Hood said. "The only thing I didn’t get to put in were outlets in the floor."

Hood used greens, yellows, pinks and reds and lots of cheerful prints.

The bee motif is a recurring theme, with bees found on dishes and sewn randomly on pillows throughout the house.

Hood used other animals as well. There are bunnies, birds, roosters, lambs, dogs and frogs, on decorative plates, fabrics, in the artwork and statuary.

Sometimes show houses are over the top, Hood said, and unreachable for visitors.

Her goal was to create a realistic, "happy" house.

"We wanted a family-friendly home that wasn’t overdone," said Hood.

The living room walls are a soft green that works well with eight different prints used throughout in shades of green, pink and yellow.

"I love to layer fabrics. It makes it interesting,"Hood said.

The Country French dining room repeats those colors in the custom-made Parsons chairs done up with pink and green plaid skirts.

One room flows into the next as the colors are repeated, often in deeper hues of the same shade.

In the hearth room, pink is darkened into red and used on the side chairs, printed drapes and accessories. The green is still there, this time in the sofa and the yellow, an accent color in the living room, plays a larger role on the walls.

Accessories draw the eye to features like the beamed ceiling and stone fireplace. Reproduction hay forks are mounted on the walls and the heavily carved legs of an old pool table hold chunky candles.

"There’s nothing in this house that isn’t doable," said Vince Hood, Lisa’s husband and co-owner of First Fruit Collection.

Upstairs, a little girl’s "frog princess" bedroom is dressed up in pink and green. The bedding and drapes use frog-printed fabrics that complement the custom-painted furniture.

To make the ballerina tutu-styled side-table, Lisa Hood cut 300 yards of white tulle into strips and threaded them through the cut-work of the metal tabletop.

And instead of a media room, now a standard in new homes, she used the sunken room upstairs for a family playroom. There, a game of Colliervilleopoly (a Collierville version of Monopoly) appears in progress on the coffee table.

"I want it to feel like we’ve interrupted someone’s life and come in here to tour their home," she said.

Next door, at the home built by Klazmer/Sklar Homes LLC, interior designers Gwen Lausterer and Karen Pennington with Samuels Furniture & Interiors took a different approach. The house has a darker, but still warm and cozy feel.

In the hearth room, sage green walls are a backdrop for a red tweed sofa, accented with pillows in rich shades of red, green and brown.

Three oversized pear sculptures sit on a deep brown antique reproduction flip-top console table.

The living room features a baby grand piano and a 13-foot curved sofa.

"It’s something, isn’t it?" Lausterer said. "I’ve forgotten how many different fabrics there are."

(There are seven, including a faux-mink throw pillow.)

Upstairs, she did a girl’s room in pink, using raspberry and lemon toile for the bedding and accessorizing with reproduction Staffordshire rabbits.

A boy’s room is in traditional shades of navy and red with prints of antique biplanes.

The homes in this year’s Vesta show are about 4,000 square feet, sit on quarter-acre lots and range in price from $500,000 to about $650,000, Caylor said.

Those houses are some of the smaller ones for the subdivision, which is still under development and will have lots up to four acres and homes from $400,000 to $1.5 million. Custom homes could go higher.

"We’ve very excited," said developer Gary Thompson, vice president of Boyle Investment Co. "We’ve got a great group of builders, we’ve created a great place and they’re building a really nice product. That translated into sales in a market that I would not describe as hot right now."

"This is the best kickoff, to my knowledge," said Vesta builder Chip Tayloe of Tayloe Construction Co. "I could have sold this house five times over."

Many of the features he’s included in his show house, including the kitchen cabinets that extend to the ceiling, the cypress trusses in the hearth room and the river rock floor in the shower of the master bath, are usually found in houses that cost twice as much.

"We kind of went overboard with everything, the marble, the appliances, the cabinetry" Tayloe said.

The builder upgrades, combined with the country setting of the subdivision, the future community pool and tennis courts, give the buyers of these Vesta homes a lot for the money.

"They’re getting a deal," said Tayloe.