Heavy/Getty Ben and Erin Napier
HGTV’s “Home Town” hosts Erin and Ben Napier have always found it essential for a home to reflect the family that lives in it, and have always tried to honor past and future homeowners’ stories on their show. So when a home is flipped without a specific owner in mind, the Napiers can tell.
Realtor.com recently reported on a “Home Town” season seven episode, “A Drop of Sunshine”, in which the Napiers’ clients Tony and Jennifer find a perfect home from 1955, however Erin and Ben can tell immediately that the house had been flipped. “When a house gets flipped, it’s like they go out of their way to disguise any tiny variation that would make it have character of any kind,” Erin said.
Erin & Ben Napier Offer Tips For How to Revive a Dull Flip
Erin and Ben accepted their clients’ challenge to revive the flipped house and give it back some of the character it lost, and along the way, they provided tips on how to fix a cheap-looking flip.
During demolition, the couple began to expose the home’s original wood flooring and brick walls, seeing what the original owners intended the house to look like. Old materials like these give the home back some of its original charms, and Ben even uses some of the original wood beams from the home’s ceiling to build a mantle and bookshelf next to the fireplace in the living room.
Another place where old materials were used was the dining room. Erin uncovered wood paneling in the ceiling, and since it was still intact, she left it there, painting it white to match her design while still keeping its original texture visible to retain some of the home’s character for its new owners.
Another big step for the Napiers was adding color throughout the gray house. Erin went to a local art gallery to surprise client Jennifer (an artist from California) with a piece of Mississippi art. She also adds a green tile in the shower, basing the color off of her client Tony’s sea glass necklace that he got from his daughter.
The biggest addition of color was on the home’s exterior. “My drop of sunshine color palette is here at [Tony and Jennifer’s] house. We have a light golden color on the top and then a darker golden color on the brick and then a robin’s egg blue on the front door and it all just reads as pure sunshine,” Erin said, before talking directly to the viewing audience, “Don’t be afraid of colors. Forget gray. Gray is dead to you now.”
Erin Napier on Picking the Perfect Paint Color
With a degree in fine art, Erin has studied a great deal about color theory, and in a July 2021 blog post, the “Home Town” host and designer shared tips for picking the perfect color for one’s home.
“Choose whatever color you like that has a bit of yellow in it to make the color feel integrated and truly part of its environment instead of too-new, too bright, not quite right, and out of place. It is so subtle, but an important delineation between a house that’s comfortable in its color vs. a house that’s squeaky,” Napier wrote. She also said that it’s important to stay in a mostly neutral color palette (she includes green in her definition of “neutral”) to allow the pops of color in a room speak for themselves.
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Erin & Ben Napier Reveal the Issue with House Flips