Building from the ground up allowed one family to build a roomy indoor-outdoor haven in Charlotte.
It was location that brought Nicki and Nathan Spang to their current home. For years, they’d lived just south of downtown Charlotte, where they could walk to restaurants and parks with their small children. But as the kids grew older, the family needed a larger home—one with a yard and room for a pool for their outdoor-loving family.
The Spangs finally found the perfect lot—an acre of land in a quaint, family-friendly neighborhood—but the home was “teeny-tiny,” says Nicki Spang, and it hadn’t been updated in years. Spang turned to Trisha Chambers, the architect who had designed the family’s previous home, for help. “She was a friend of ours and had retired, but I texted her and asked if she would come out of retirement to design our house,” Spang says. The ladies met for a walk-through and, “by the time we left, Trisha said she’d pretty much designed our whole new home,” laughs Spang.
Right away, the Spangs enlisted the help of interior designer Maggie Crandall of Crandall Haus, who worked with BDI Building Group to design the new home. Once the former house was razed, the real challenge began: constructing the home on a steeply sloped lot. To that end, Chambers tailored the floor plan to suit the landscape, with a sunken family room and an elevated kitchen separated by a set of stairs. “There are a lot of little levels in the house, which makes it a bit more interesting,” says Crandall of the architecture.
Executing the arched, double-sided plaster fireplace, which separates the family room and the kitchen, also presented a bit of a challenge, but one that resulted in an element Spang adores. “That was a labor of love,” she explains. The plaster itself was imported from Italy, and there were only a handful of people in Charlotte who could do plaster work. Moreover, the fireplace was thirty-six-feet high and required multiple coats before it was finished. “The guy who did the plaster pretty much lived with us for a month and a half,” she laughs.
Crandall began designing the interiors by incorporating a neutral palette that suited Spangs’s calming, California-chic style. She went bold, however, in the kitchen, where she installed black-and-white quartz countertops, offsetting the white-oak cabinets and flooring; Crandall also embellished the space with black sconces and black hardware in the barstools.
Construction on the home took two years, during which time the Spangs sold their home and moved to an apartment closer to their new home. The results were well worth the wait. The home checks all the boxes for the family—especially its seamless transition from indoor to outdoor living. A porch runs the length of the back of the home, leading to the outdoor patio, pool, and hot tub, which the family uses every day. “My husband and I will cold plunge in the hot tub when it’s cold out,” Spang says. It’s also an ideal home for entertaining: “We host lots of friends, lots of baseball parties and back-to-school events,” she says. “Even when we go on vacation, it feels really nice to come home.”
