An interior design and construction firm is using a new brick-and-mortar presence near downtown Grand Rapids to help clients better visualize their custom homes.
After nearly five years of running the business from their Ada home, the owners of Hygge Design+Build LLC last month acquired a 1,000-square-foot building at 251 State St. SE in the city’s Heritage Hill neighborhood.
Wife-and-husband owners Becky and Nate Vandenbroek say they hope to grow the business by creating a space centered around client collaboration, and a hub for client meetings and working through the design process.
Hygge Design+Build, which does custom builds within an hour’s radius of Grand Rapids, established its brick-and-mortar space after an affiliated entity acquired the repurposed former gas station for $340,000 in early September, according to property records.
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The space will offer more opportunities for Hygge Design+Build to showcase different design elements, allow for a greater degree of flexibility to fit customer needs, and expand the business in the future, Nate Vandenbroek said.
The Vandenbroeks previously worked from the first home they built, which acted as a sort of model to walk clients through and showcase details of the space and the possibilities of a finished product.
However, as the business grew — and the couple sold their original home — the Vandenbroeks saw an opportunity to have a separate space to work with clients.
“In our old space, we were essentially showing the same level of finish over and over, the same kind of trim and drywall and color, paint color and stuff. And the new one, we can get a lot more flexibility around what the client needs are and what we want to display,” Nate Vandenbroek said. “We lean pretty heavily into design. We don’t just send clients off to the tile store or off to the exterior cladding place or anything like that. We will spend quite a bit of time curating options for them, and we bring those all into a single place, and that’s what our showroom will be for.”
Approximately 65% of the Hygge Design+Build location will be designated for client space. This could include wall mock-ups, paint samples, tile samples and opportunities for larger finishes of what the home space will look like rather than images or smaller swatches, Vandenbroek said.
Hygge Design+Build currently builds six to seven homes a year with annual gross revenue of $5 to $6 million. The expansion to a physical space is a step toward the company’s two-year goal of completing 12 new builds a year.
A central location is important for establishing a “physical footprint” for the company, Vandenbroek said. Hygge Design+Build’s client base largely consists of people moving into the West Michigan area from out of state to establish second or new homes in the area, he added.
“I think there’s a little bit of legitimacy that comes with having your own building,” Vandenbroek said. “We’re excited to be downtown. We look forward to starting to participate in the community that’s down here.”
Hillary Taatjes Woznick and Todd Leinberger of NAI Wisinski of West Michigan represented the seller, Kantor & Wassink Properties LLC, in the property deal.
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