He Made it easy

"We moved from California to Collierville. We found Chris Dickens online and called during a visit to the area. We weren't committed to building a new home but we were open to the idea. We became a lot more interested after meeting with him. Chris is very personable. He met with us quickly. We were able to set up a meeting within a few days of calling. We talked to him at one of his homes. After that, we made the decision to take advantage of the equity from our California home to do a complete custom build here.

We had a farmhouse-style home in mind and looked at Chris’ previous builds. We thought he'd be a great fit for us. He’s really knowledgeable. I'd never gone through a new construction loan process and didn’t know how it all worked. For someone new to building a new home, it was nice to have someone who could help us navigate this process. He knew what it looked like and had a network of lenders and good local knowledge.

My wife is very detail-oriented and has a beautiful eye for style and decor. She's got a gift for it. His style at that time was very unique to Collierville. Not many were building a design style we liked. Chris was among the few available with the look that was appealing to us.

Our home is a unique style design - even when compared to Chris's other homes. I've seen a bunch of them. My wife came up with some new ideas and he was flexible and helped us with our vision of what we wanted. We were able to meet with Carson Looney of LRK, a downtown Memphis architect firm. We told him what we wanted and he and Chris created two elevations for us and we picked one of the two that was exactly what we wanted. They captured our ideal for our style.

I’d describe our home as a little modern with a classic farmhouse look. We have some interesting elements in there such as reused brick from a building in Chicago. It's really old brick - so old we wanted to incorporate it in but it was a little brittle and Chris helped us work that out. Using reclaimed material is special.

Some touches we love - the molding is special. My wife wanted bigger molding. The casings around doorways really make the rooms pop. The lighting is really, really good in this house. We have so much natural light that we didn’t even need all the lights I asked for. It’s so bright and open feeling. The master is huge. Most people want a master bedroom downstairs. We wanted it upstairs and it's enormous - it's basically a wing in the house. We have a huge closet - it's almost the size of a small bedroom! We asked for these requests and Chris went with it.

He made it easy! (As easy as it could possibly be.) The turnaround was quick. In April we broke ground and we moved in by Thanksgiving!”

-Charles P.