BUILDING upon the past
Edmond’s Cottage Grove addition offers mix of throwback architecture
At first glance, Cottage Grove in Edmond looks like a neighborhood that might have come of age under President Franklin Roosevelt or even his cousin Teddy. The homes lining its winding streets appear gracefully vintage and varied, with groves of mature trees softening the edges.
But no — ground was broken for the 135home first phase in 2014.
Listening to the McGregor brothers talk about it, though, it becomes obvious that this neighborhood northeast of E Covell Road and N Midwest Boulevard is more than a place that appears out of time.
For Scott McGregor, 33, who co-owns McGregor Homes with his father, Mike, the designs serve as postcards from the road.
“McGregor Homes is a collection of our favorite styles, which have also come from our travels around the country,” he said.
He draws inspiration from his Southern California roots, a region where many experts say the American Craftsman style first gained a foothold. A trip to Cape Cod introduced him to the clean, simple lines of that region’s architecture. A trip to Colorado brought him face to face with what he calls “Mountain Meets Modern.”
All in all, McGregor Homes offers variations on four designs: Modern Craftsman, Modern Farmhouse, Modern Mountain and Cape Cod Modern.
“We build off a portfolio, but each house really looks different and unique to the neighborhood,” he said. “That’s kind of a big part of the personality we’re trying to set out here, just having character in a neighborhood like this and not just doing a tract-type neighborhood.”
Brother Paul McGregor, 30, who owns Shiloh Homes, meanwhile, looks to the past, re-creating an intensely elabo- rate Craftsman look that briefly reigned in the early 1900s.
He said he finds inspiration in the work of Charles and Henry Greene, another pair of brothers, architects, who built primarily in California during the early 20th century. The Gamble House in Pasadena, California, built about 1909, may be their best-known work but far from the only one.
“There were a lot of homes they built out there (in California), and they were just stunningly gorgeous,” Paul McGregor said. “But they fell out of popularity because it’s not easy building this style of home. There’s a lot of interlocking wooden joints and overlapping wood, both on the outside and the inside.”
But he’s undaunted, working to bring that element of grandeur into his own home designs.
“I really tried to re-create that,” he said, “the whole experience where people walk into a home and say, ‘Wow, this obviously took a lot of work to create.’ Might even make them wonder, ‘How did they do that?’ ”
So on one hand, there’s Modern Craftsman. On the other is Historic Craftsman.
The two styles play well together in Cottage Grove, where the McGregors hope to break ground on the second phase in the not-too-distant future.
Homebuilding tradition
The brothers grew up in the business in Southern California where their father, Mike McGregor, worked at everything from landscape architect to master carpenter. They both did what Scott McGregor calls the “ugly work” — digging trenches, pouring concrete, whatever needed to be done.
Scott McGregor stuck with it, often working alongside his father while learning the business from the ground up. When he retired in the early 2000s, Mike McGregor and his wife, Debbie, headed east to settle close to family in Oklahoma.
Scott McGregor followed with his own family a few years later, turned off by California’s struggling construction industry. He worked as construction manager for McCaleb Homes, then joined his father in 2009 to found McGregor Homes.
Meanwhile, brother Paul took a path of his own — college, a stint at a law firm, restless journeys on his motorcycle.
“I kind of had dreams of being a sailor,” he said, a pursuit that led him to Houston, and back to Southern California, but never landed him in a boat. Homebuilding stayed in the back of his mind, though, and when his brother asked him to join in the business in 2013, he happily accepted.
Paul McGregor said he learned the mechanics of homebuilding under his brother’s tutelage, how to plan a build from beginning to end. “I stayed with him two years, maybe, and then from there was able to have my own kind of creative take on homebuilding,” he said.
He took what he learned and established Shiloh Homes in 2015. Shiloh now has several homes underway in Cottage Grove, including a 2,300-square-foot, Gamble House-inspired Craftsman taking shape at 7608 Walk in the Park.
Their father regularly checks in from his summer home in Colorado, but the brothers push forward with their projects in Cottage Grove.
“It’s worked well together,” Scott McGregor said. “We don’t build the exact same thing, so there really isn’t a competitive thing — other than brothers being brothers.”