Grand plan becomes reality
In retirement, Houston couple flips life so tthat San Marcos, once a place to visit, becomes special home
Will Holder’s love for his alma mater — Texas State University — and San Marcos has never wavered in the many years he’s lived in Houston and worked in the city’s homebuilding industry.
The proud alumnus kept an 1,850-square-foot second home there for years, and couldn’t wait for Fridays to end so he could head there for relaxing weekends, especially during football season.
When he met and married Svetlana “Lana” Holder five years ago, the college and Hill Country culture became part of her life, too.
Throughout his tenure at Trendmaker Homes — he was president when he retired in April 2018 — his plan was to retire at the 25-year mark and flip his Houston-San Marcos life.
Instead of having his main home in Houston and his second home in San Marcos, San Marcos would become the center of his and Lana’s lives, and Houston would be the place they visit for events and to see old friends.
They met architect Pax Chagnon and were planning to expand or replace their longtime San Marcos home, one that was smallish but charming and just three minutes from campus.
Everything changed when Will’s sister and brother-in-law called to mention a house down the street — they all lived in the same Spring Lake Hills neighborhood — that might be for sale. Will persuaded the owner to sell the lot to him, and when the Holders walked the property, they knew the spectacular lot demanded a very special home.
“When we looked at the lot, Lana walked out to where the pool was and said, ‘I love this,’ then I said, ‘There goes my savings,’ ” he said with a hearty laugh. “We didn’t originally have the budget that we spent, but when we got the lot, it had to change. It was worth it.”
The home sits on a bluff, and its terraced backyard leads down to a small barn where the previous owner once had ponies for his daughters. (Now a family of furry foxes has taken up residence there.) A horse farm sits in the distance, and the sprawling Spring Creek Nature Preserve promises they’ll never have neighbors down there — not close ones, anyway.
At night they can sit in their backyard and see the bright moon and sparkling stars against a black sky, and they were in a fabulous position to watch the recent Blood Wolf Moon eclipse.
“It’s very exciting. We were already happy, but this view is overwhelming,” Will said, looking out through huge panels of windows on the back of his home. “The moon rose last night, and it was red. It lit up the whole valley. We’re walking in this park big time. The trails are lovely.”
Jaxon, a 6-year-old blond rescue dog that seems to always be at Will’s heels, tags along on trail walks, and he’s apparently better at obeying Lana’s commands in Russian than in English. “When people ask me what he is, I tell them he’s a white Russian terrier,” Will joked.
So the plans that Chagnon and Will had been working on went into the trash. This new lot held all kinds of possibilities and would need something completely different.
Thinking it through
The Holders wanted something more modern yet fitting in the Hill Country style and their neighborhood of 60-year-old mostly ranch-style homes.
They agreed on a clay-tile roof and limestone and stucco exterior, and the Holders had a kitchen floor plan — a favorite from Trendmaker — that they wanted. They needed to be able to age in place and have space for entertaining and for weekend guests.
Between them, they have three 20-something children — Will, 62, has a son and a daughter, and Lana, who turns 50 this month, has a son and looks after a godson — so extra space for occasional visits is important, too.
Those criteria drove a plan for a home in two parts, with an implied entrance at the gap between them. An arched stone opening followed by a second one with big iron gates draw you there, but the main home is to the left, and the guest house is to the right. Walk straight through, and you’ll find yourself on a wide patio in front of a cool blue swimming pool, looking out at a mileslong view.
One step inside the main home and you’re already wowed by the vertical slab of semi-transparent onyx. When the sun shines through, the movement in the rock mimics the movement of the San Marcos River, which starts at Aquarena Springs at the base of the hill you climb to get to their neighborhood.
The stone slab was Chagnon’s idea, and Lana loved it, too. Will likes to joke that the two ganged up on him about the onyx, but now that it’s done, he’s even more proud of it than they are.
Taking care of future house guests was important, so they decided that the three guest rooms would all be suites, similarly sized bedrooms with identical bathrooms.
An aging swimming pool was replaced with one that includes a hot tub and a bronze sculpture — a woman with arms stretched upward embracing the sky — that the couple bought on a trip to Santa Fe, N.M., is perched on the edge.
Inside, a taupe-neutral color palette fills both sides of the home, with pops of blue and other favorite colors that show up in artwork.
Lana worked with Heather Scruggs, a merchandising manager at Trendmaker who worked with Will for many years, on their new home’s inte-
riors. The two women shopped online, perused catalogs and visited local furniture stores.
Except for Will’s interest in some living-room furniture — recliners were the subject of more than one conversation; Will wanted them and the women did not — Lana and Scruggs handled all of the furnishings.
The main living area — that Trendmaker-style kitchen with a dining area and living room — is large enough for the couple to host big parties, with room for friends and guests to drift out to the patio.
Huge white oak trusses cover the living and dining areas, with a grid of ceiling beams installed over the kitchen — another idea from Chagnon. When the home was built, the foundation was poured, walls were built and the trusses set in place as part of the home’s structure. Then the roof went on afterward.
Special consideration was given to water since the water supply to the Holders’ home was hard and rusty despite the crystal-clear Aquarena Springs nearby. Chagnon and Will designed a 20,000-gallon cistern outdoors, so the home’s water supply comes from rainwater.
When Will needed a builder, he called his friend Jim Limming, who owns Partners in Building. Will and Limming have been friends a long time, and Will, who created the Texas Casual Cottages homebuilding company in Round Top, sold it to Limming four years ago.
Limming’s Partners in Building company builds about 200 homes a year in Houston and has offices in San Antonio and Austin that handle about 50 homes a year in Central Texas.
Chagnon and Limming both spoke of the migration of Houstonians like the Holders to Central Texas. They often start with a weekend getaway in the country, from the Fayette County-Washington County area on over toward the stretch between Austin and San Antonio. Eventually, the weekends get longer and those vacation homes become retirement homes.
“In the Hill Country, I’ll bet a third of our buyers are from the Houston area. Pre-retirement, people use it as a family oasis, and in many instances, someone retires and lives there full time,” Limming said. “People buy a tractor or put in their own pond or an orchard or start beekeeping. They do activities they don’t have the ability to do here in Houston.”
Finding each other
Will had been divorced for 10 years when he and Lana, also divorced, met online. It was a simple way to meet people they otherwise might never encounter, and from the first date, both knew it was right.
Lana is Russian, born and raised in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania. She came to Houston for her work placing orphaned Russian children with adoptive families in the U.S. She found families for more than 200 children in her 20-year career before Russian President Vladimir Putin banned the adoption of Russian children to American families in 2012.
Throughout those years, Lana stayed in touch with adoptive families and watched children grow up through photos and news that came in letters and phone calls.
In her own retirement, she’s tapped into her creative side, learning to paint and make gorgeous silk scarves with soft wool fused in through the Nuno felting technique. The painstaking process results in scarves of various colors and patterns, but making just one scarf takes two full days. The gorgeous shawllike pieces used to be sold through the BB1 Classic store in Houston but now are available on her website, studiojoy .studio. All money raised goes to the Hays-Caldwell Women’s Center in San Marcos.
Will had always planned to retire on his 25th anniversary at Trendmaker. And though he went just a little bit past the actual date, the transition from president to retiree was swift.
For the last couple of years he’d been working while the home was being designed and built. On April 7, 2018, Will walked out of Trendmaker for the last time, got in his car and drove to San Marcos, where Lana and Scruggs were finishing the installation of their furniture and art, 85 percent of which is new.
“He saw the house completely empty and came back in 48 hours and everything was in, all the pictures on the wall, everything,” Lana said. “It was good that he was not around. His extra advice would make it go longer.”
Will started his 37-year home-building career at David Weekley Homes when he saw a classified ad that said, “We’ll teach you to build homes.” He responded to the ad, and 11 days later he had a job. He later worked at Lokey Properties and Village Builders before going to Trendmaker, where they built some 500 homes a year, mostly in the city’s suburbs and at an average price of $500,000.
Retiree isn’t likely to be Will’s job status for long. While in Houston, he also taught classes in the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business for five years, and when that ended he thought he’d scratched it off of his bucket list.
An active Texas State alum — it was Southwest Texas State University when he studied political science there in the ’70s — Will learned the school was creating a teaching job for residential construction, and he’s back in. He’ll be professor of practice, residential construction, starting in the fall.
“I have so much passion about this industry. It’s primitive … ” he said. “The home, shelter, is an essential element of life.”