Choosing the right team is important in beach volleyball. It’s even more important when building your dream house.
You’re ready to build the beach house you’ve always wanted. You’ve picked your perfect South Bay beach town, and maybe you even have your parcel. Now it’s time to pick your team.
It’s like beach volleyball. Each of the six players on a volleyball team has a highly specific and critical role in the team’s overall success. The players are not interchangeable. You need excellent passers, hitters, and blockers, and you need everyone working together to do what they do best. Great volleyball teams work because everyone knows their role and no one tries to be the (singular) star…but also because everyone is willing to improvise if necessary.
It’s about everyone respecting each other for their individual talents, and everyone working collaboratively for the good of the whole. It’s about chemistry and synchronicity. That’s true across disciplines, for any team—including a design/build team.
White Sands Design/Build is a solid unit made up of multi-disciplined virtuosos, who truly enjoy working with each other. The latter is what makes us entirely unique in this space. We all have well-honed skills that go far beyond our day-to-day job titles, and these seemingly unrelated (to custom home-building) skills are anything but. Not only do our earlier careers offer particular value to our current position in the design/build space, but our talents complement each others’ in a fortuitous way.
First off, our designer, Hawlie, is a nerd—to the point where she loves using CAD (computer-aided design) programs, which most designers grumpily tolerate. But she’s also a former journalist. This means she understands human psychology and how to ask the right questions to get the most useful answers—the answers that tell us exactly what kind of space you want to live in, even if you don’t have the technical terms to describe that space yourself.
While Hawlie is delving deep into your psyche, our project designers are ensuring that those necessary home systems, such as cooling, plumbing, and electrical, operate efficiently but without interfering with any design magic.
Brett, our director of operations, has a range of business, project management, and investment experience. But he’s also a former college basketball coach. Coaching requires extraordinary people skills. Brett is able to recognize and organize around people’s strengths, ensuring that the entire team runs like a well-oiled machine.
Because we keep everything in-house, we follow the most logical path through the process. We communicate faster and better than if we were passing design documents and shuffling decisions among various firms. We make deliberate rather than reactive decisions. In short, we function exactly as a top beach volleyball team should.
What does this mean for you? Everything gets done quickly and correctly, and you don’t have to worry or stress about anything. To be honest, that’s our true secret. We work well for you because we work well together. To quote William Wordsworth, “The ocean is a mighty harmonist.” And so are we.
Thanks for reading,
Hawlie Ohe
Hawlie Ohe heads White Sands Interiors, and she and her husband are raising two boys along the South Bay coast. Hawlie brings the curiosity that fueled her first career, as a journalist, to her interior design approach: Who are you, who do want to be, and how can this space get you there? Great design makes you feel present and engaged, and Hawlie is here for it. Because she wants to help you be “here” (in this space, in this moment), too.
