HOME TOWN HEROES

Sweethearts ERIN AND BEN NAPIER are helping to rebuild their small Mississippi town one house at a time— and HGTV viewers can’t get enough. Plus: Their smart tips for your home makeover.

Erin and Ben Napier, known to millions as the stars of the HGTV hit series Home Town, still can’t believe that renovating houses in tiny Laurel, Miss., has made them famous. “We do such a mundane thing,” says Erin, 34. “We work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” says Ben, 36. “Yeah, we have a cameraman and a director, but it’s like we’re going to work in an office with our construction team or on a job site.”

The show, entering its fourth season, follows Erin and Ben as they turn dilapidated old houses into dream digs. It’s also bringing new energy to Laurel, an old timber town of almost 19,000 that waned in the mid–20th century once the area’s loblolly pine forests were logged. Laurel has “seen some hard times,” said Ben in the show’s season-one opening. “We’re committed to changing that one house at a time.”

The series has turned Erin and Ben into America’s newest home renovation sweethearts and made Laurel a tourist destination for fans of the show. Visitors drive through the historic district looking for some of the 30-plus houses renovated on the show— as well as for the Napiers’ 1925 Craftsman. They shop at businesses the Napiers are partners in, such as Laurel Mercantile Co., a housewares boutique, and Scotsman General Store, which sells boots, flannel shirts, craft soda and the Napiers’ own brand of coffee, Big Ben’s Blend. Ben’s woodshop is housed there too. It features an exhibition window, so visitors can watch him make furniture for the show.

In a twist, this year the Napiers are hitting the road to revitalize another small town for a 2021 six-episode spinoff series, Home

Town Rescue. The couple will help members of a yet-to-be-named community renovate homes and upgrade public spaces. Don’t worry, Laurel, they’re not leaving permanently. The original show will go on. “We never want to live anywhere else,” Erin says. “We love it here.”

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

Erin grew up in Laurel wanting to be a book designer, inspired by her real estate agent mother’s painting and writing and an aunt who was into scrapbooking. Her aunt gave her a “big, huge photo album with staticky sheets,” and little Erin filled it with leaves she found, newspaper clippings about dinosaur bone discoveries and her own writing. In seventh grade, she discovered typography. “As soon as we got a computer, that’s when graphic design began for me,” Erin says. “I would make these fake ads, fake logos. I had fun with type.”

Erin and Ben both attended a junior college in nearby Ellisville, Miss. He was a 20-year-old history major, the son of a Methodist minister who had grown up in little towns all over the South. She was an 18-year-old graphic design major, the daughter of a doctor whose family had lived in Laurel for generations. He was outgoing and funny. She was quiet and artistic. They met when she took his photo for a yearbook feature. “Six days later, we decided we would get married—when we got out of school,” Erin says. “We’ve been inseparable ever since.”

They transferred to Ole Miss, and that’s when Ben picked up woodworking. When Erin needed

frames for a student exhibition, Ben made them. He’d done rough carpentry, but fine woodworking was new. “It became an obsession,” Ben says. Yep, he became a woodworker for the woman he loved.

Erin inspired his first foray into furniture making. “I wanted a $3,000 armoire I saw in an antiques mall, and we couldn’t afford it,” she says. So Ben built one just like it for her. He discovered that making furniture made him happy and that there was no place he would rather be than in a woodshop. “My real passion is furniture design,” Ben says. “You can get lost in it.”

FAME FOUND THEM

After they graduated college, the couple moved back to Laurel. “My parents said, ‘You’re very talented, but you live in Mississippi, baby. It’s just going to be hard to be a professional artist,’ ” Erin says. “And I was like, ‘No it’s not. Just watch, and I’ll show you.’ I think it was a little bit of a rebellion for me to come back here.”

She worked as a graphic designer, then started her own business designing letterpress wedding invitations. Ben was a woodworker, Methodist student ministry director and Mr. Loblolly, the town’s official lumberjack mascot. They bought the gorgeous old house Erin had wanted to live in since she was a little girl, began renovating it and they got two fuzzy dogs.

Their big break came when an HGTV executive started following Erin’s Instagram account and saw the makings of a TV show about an adorable couple’s life in a small town in the Deep South. The executive, Lindsey Weidhorn, who now runs her own production company, asked the Napiers if they were game. Erin and Ben said yes, hoping they’d draw positive attention to Laurel.

Home Town premiered in March 2017 and was an instant hit. The show is a paean to small-town life, where neighbors are friendly, church bells ring on the hour and mortgage payments are small. You can watch for hours as Ben and Erin rescue wood floors from shag carpet, eradicate 1980s kitchens and get it all together in time for the big reveal.

SCRAPPY, NOT CRAPPY

On each episode, a homeowner chooses one of two homes selected by the Napiers, buys the place and hands the keys over for the remodel. The couple works with contractors, artisans and designers to direct the renovation. Ben makes a few pieces of custom furniture and features for the house, like a banquette made of wood repurposed from the local high school gym or a kitchen table