PRESENTATION
Festival of Homes, which continues this weekend, spotlights Moore and Norman areas
Achandelier hangs in the master bath and the patio is wired for a television, but smaller things set the home in Norman apart. Built-in fire pit in the backyard? Check. An unusual dark matte finish on the kitchen faucet? Check. Adjustable shelves and loads of storage in the downstairs study? Check and check.
Norman’s Denali Homes built the fourbedroom, 3 ½-bath home at 704 Timber Trail in the Vintage Creek neighborhood, north of W Tecumseh Road between N Porter Avenue and 12 Avenue NW.
It’s a showplace, one of two special feature homes in the Festival of Homes, which continues Saturday and Sunday and again June 8-10 with homes in and around Norman and Moore open free to the public from 1 to 7 p.m.
Jay London Homes built Moore’s feature, a farmhouse-inspired home at 2621 SW 38 in Moore’s Seiter Farms neighborhood. It will be featured June 9 in The Oklahoman’s real estate section.
The Festival of Homes is presented by the Builders Association of South Central Oklahoma (BASCO), Moore Home Builders Association and Southwest Builders Association. Guidebooks are free at participating 7-Eleven stores, and available online at http://basco-festival.com/.
Coming in at more than 2,900 square feet, the Norman feature home has a bonus room with a full bath upstairs and a large patio that adds another 400 square feet of covered living space outside.
And then the details: wrought-iron stair railings, custom cabinetry in the kitchen painted a soothing gray, extrahigh-quality carpet underfoot in a bedroom.
It’s a show home, but what it shows is nothing out of the ordinary for Denali Homes, said Kelly Webb, who owns the homebuilding company with Ross Couch.
“This is what we build all the time,” he said. “This is our style; this is what we do. Sometimes we do stained finishes, and obviously this is a painted house, but there’s not a whole lot of ‘upgrade’ here. It is what we do.”
The home is for sale for $449,995. Proceeds will help fund the BASCO student chapter at the University of Oklahoma and scholarships at MidAmerica Technology Center and Moore Norman Technology Center for students interested in construction.
It’s one of several that Denali has been building in Vintage Creek.
“In this price point of home, there aren’t any areas on the west side — like west of I-35 in Norman — that’s even available,” Webb said. “So this provides the ease of location of westside Norman, but it’s the newer north part of Norman, so you still have the same easy access to the highway, same school districts, things like that. So we really felt like this was going to be a really hot market for this price point of homes.”
‘Durability and confidence’
Couch and Ross have been building together since 2016 after crossing paths several times as individual builders. They drew their name from the Denali mountain peak in Alaska, the highest peak in North America.
“We wanted something that embodied strength and durability and confidence,” Couch said. “We thought that Denali fit really well.”
In just the past few years, combinations of appliances and phone apps have been transforming mere homes into smart homes, with functions ranging from setting alarms to turning on lights and locking doors controlled from afar. The Denali feature home has Yamaha’s MusicCast MultiRoom Wireless Audio System, which not only allows users to control music and sound through their phone, but different stations to play in different rooms.
Home designs have changed, as well, with customers bringing in different ideas of how to use the space in their homes. Take, for example, the study.
“They’re still wanting a study, but they’re not wanting to waste a bunch of room on it,” Webb said. “So we’ve cut down our studies to a smaller space and incorporated that (space) into something else, like the outdoor living or the bedroom square footage.”