School Ties

For Stylecraft's next project, French did a little tweaking, keeping that sea of cars and pickup trucks in mind.

“Kids don't care about a big backyard,” says French. “They just need room for a keg and a place to keep the Chihuahua. So we took the driveways and had them come up the front and around to the back, which worked much better. But we spent so much money on concrete that we could have built alleys. So the next gyration was parking in the back. By city specifications, it's not really an alley, but it works like one. That keeps the ugly part out of the way.”

Then French noticed that yard maintenance wasn't high on his students' to-do lists. “You'd drive around and see that this yard looked good, the next was mowed, and then the next one looked like it hadn't been mowed in weeks,” explains French. “So we said, ‘The next project needs to have a sprinkler system installed and a homeowners' association that will take care of mowing.'”

That's exactly what's in place at Style-craft's latest project, Southern Trace, a 30-acre neighborhood that's just four miles from the Texas A&M campus. It's where all of Stylecraft's student-related tweaking has come to fruition. Every one of the 108 four-bedroom homes, base-priced between $147,000 and $156,900, was sold before the first house was built. All will be filled with students. And, for a reasonable $65 monthly fee, the HOA will take care of the yards.

Stylecraft didn't have to change its standard floor plans much to accommodate the students at Southern Trace. Eric Wivagg, the company's in-house designer, re-tooled the three-bedroom plans into four bedrooms with four baths after the company found that three-bedroom, three-bath plans were the last to sell.

The living areas and kitchens aren't huge, says French, but “these are college kids. They all have different hours and come and go a lot, so the living areas didn't need to be that big. The kitchens aren't as large as they would be in a traditional single-family home, but college kids really just want a microwave, an oven, and a place to keep the beer.”

Where the company went to some trouble was with the elevations, which they tried to vary. Brick is king in Texas, but Stylecraft has had success with shaking up its neo-traditional elevations through strategic use of stone, different trim and front-door treatments, and Hardiplank. “Hardiplank has been great for us,” says French. “Even with our scorching summers, it keeps the paint well and lets us use some nice, bold colors.”

The company has also taken a stronger stand when it comes to which elevation gets built where, to help the neighborhood flow, French says. “We pre-determined which plan and which elevation would go on which lot,” says French. “We gave that to sales and said, ‘Here it is. If someone wants a particular elevation, it has to be on a particular lot.' That's helped us a lot on the production side, too.”

Southern Trace has been sold in three phases, with French pressing for a construction cycle that's closer to a 100-day turnaround. “Last year, with phase one, we noticed that we had houses sitting without anything being done for three or four days in a row, so we did a labor analysis,” he says. “We met with all our subcontractors and found out how many crews they could commit to us, how many rough-ins and trims they could do a week, and then did the math. That let us really get out and assess the resource load. Things have gone much smoother and in a more timely fashion. We should hit the 100-day cycle time on every house this year.”

Now, when French drives through the latest iteration of his student-oriented housing effort, he likes what he sees. There are 19 houses still left to be built in 2008, but right now Southern Trace can boast 49 completed homes and 40 under construction. Cars and pickup trucks (a favorite in Texas) are parked neatly behind each completed house, just beyond the tidy fenced-in backyard. The sprinkler systems are keeping the St. Augustine grass green.

And French has yet to see a repeat of something he spied one Monday morning at a previous project after what must have been quite the football weekend: a lawn chair on top of a roof.

Kathleen Stanley is a freelance writer based in Washington.

• Community: Southern Trace
• Total acreage: 30
• Date opened for sale: January 2006
• Product: Student-oriented four-bedroom homes; buyers can choose from four floor plans with three elevations each
• Price range: Base prices range from $147,000 to $156,900; homes rent for $400 per bedroom
• Total number of for-sale units at build-out: 108
• Sales to date: 108
• Builder/Developer/Architect: Stylecraft Builders, College Station
• Interior designer: Mary DeWalt Design Group, Austin, Texas
• Landscape architect: Robert Ruth Landscape Architect, College Station