HGTV / YouTube Erin and Ben Napier
HGTV’s Erin Napier took to social media on February 21 to share an update as she worked on a home renovation for her hit show “Home Town”.
Napier first shared a message to Instagram stories, but she later posted a screenshot of the image to her Twitter. The post included a selfie of Napier with the message, “Doing demo work on the house of a couple who went to our church who’ve since passed away. Maybe the most complicated part of our work: honoring people we cared about who lived in these homes while also making it personal for the next family. Bittersweet.”
See Napier’s message below.
Erin & Ben Write About ‘Home Town’ Families on Their Blog
One way Erin and her husband and “Home Town” cohost, Ben Napier, honor homeowners is by sharing their stories. In addition to featuring local Laurel, Mississippi families on their show and referring to homes based on the most recent owners, the couple has been running a journal on their business Laurel Mercantile’s website. The posts go all the way back to 2010, years before the Napiers had any inkling of landing on HGTV.
While their journal posts fall into a wide range of topics, there is a full section about “Home Town”, and Erin, Ben, and their Laurel Mercantile team use this section to highlight different homeowners and homebuyers who have appeared on the show and share their stories.
One such story was that of Ella Roberts, known to Ben and Erin as “Miss Ella”. While Miss Ella is not a Laurel resident, she was featured on “Home Town Takeover” when Erin and Ben travelled to her home town of Wetumpka, Alabama. The Napiers’ blog post shares the story of how Miss Ella worked to become the first African American woman to serve on the Wetumpka Police Department team.
“I’ve served for over 21 years in the Wetumpka Police Department, and I love my job so much. My greatest passion is serving children in the community. I love creating programs that teach kids the most important things, and it keeps them out of trouble. It’s a small town and everybody knows everybody, which I think is even more reason to look out for one another,” Miss Ella said of her career acheivements.
Erin and Ben helped update Miss Ella’s home to show more of her personality, and in the blog post wrote that the entire Wetumpka community was thrilled for her to get this opportunity.
Erin Napier is Honoring Her Own Home With Her Upcoming Book
In addition to honoring homeowners, Erin has also stressed the importance of honoring a home and the memories made in a home. As such, the two-time author is coming out with her third book, “Heirloom Rooms”, on October 3. Her goal in this book is to show off homes that are lived in and loved.
“I’ve become bored of the photos of perfectly styled and staged interiors you see so much of in the online world and wanted to write a book celebrating the imperfection of our houses… I wanted to write essays about our own home wherein every room is its own chapter about a particular time in our life together and I invited friends and designers to be contributors, self-photographing their unstaged and lived-in rooms and sharing their stories of what makes it theirs and no one else’s,” Napier wrote in her announcement of the book on Instagram.
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Erin Napier Shares ‘Bittersweet’ Update While Filming ‘Home Town’