When the judges for our 2009 Excellence Awards couldn’t stop talking about one of the contest entries a few weeks ago in our offices, it caught my attention. Several times during the day — as the project was passed from judge to judge — conversations would start up again and again about how awesome this house is; What a great job the builder did; How it perfectly addresses the homeowners’ needs.

It was so good, the judges discussed giving it best-in-show recognition, even though we don’t have a Best-In-Show award. So, they talked about creating one, but ultimately decided to table any action until they had time to thoughtfully develop rules and requirements for such an award. The judges — two builders, two architects and an interior designer — control who wins what, so their decision was final.

However, they never said anything about giving the project exposure on this blog, so I’m going to give you a sneak peek at the project that got the judges so worked up. The project won the Vacation Home category. Here are some stats:

Location: Texas
Size: 1,300 sq. ft. (perfectly sized, the judges said)
Cost: $260,000
Builder: Laughlin Homes and Restoration
President: Richard Laughlin

Now, here are a few photos of this perfectly sized vacation home the judges liked so much (click image for larger version). Enjoy, and look for the rest of the winners in our July/August 2009 issue.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.