Pippin Design Homes

Pippin Home Designs

AN INSPIRED LIFE STORY OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

By Jenny Pippin

Raised on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, Jenny Pippin embraced the foundations of hard work, entrepreneurship, and an appreciation for Mother Nature. Growing up she always knew she would one day lead her own company. And later she knew it would be through the lens of creativity and seeing opportunity amidst difficult situations.

Her journey began when she entered an architectural technology program in her 20’s which fulfilled her passions for homes, art, and nature. Upon graduation, the School of Hard Knocks took over where her degree left off.

At the age of 26, Jenny was in a nearly fatal car accident that rendered her temporarily disabled in a full body cast for four months. She quickly learned that her home did not accommodate someone with physical challenges and saw the importance of designing functional homes.

The same home that created such a mobility challenge for Jenny was also a passive solar home. Jenny initially was elated about experiencing a home that harnessed the energy of the sun. Unfortunately, the solar thermal mass had been inadequately designed and resulted in an uncomfortable home that was overheated in the summertime.

Again, she took this lesson to heart and saw the tremendous opportunity for homes to work in tandem with their surrounding environment. This inspired her to go back to school at the North Carolina Solar Center at NCSU with a focus on energy efficiency and solar design, eventually obtaining a Green Building Diploma and a Renewable Energy Technology Diploma.

After working three years in the home design industry, Jenny was ready to follow in her elders’ footsteps of becoming an entrepreneur. She founded Pippin Home Designs in 1986 and moved into a rental on Lake Norman, NC. This home gave her the firsthand experience of the

way a fabulous view can make you feel in your home. However, this house neglected to take full advantage of the views available. She could see clearly the opportunities missed and knew immediately how she would have designed the home differently to maximize the views.

It was around this time Jenny was invited by a builder to design a home to be entered in the “Street of Dreams” Homes Tour on Lake Norman. It was her first opportunity to enter a design into a competition. Her design won both Best of Show and Best of Architectural Design and launched her reputation as an award-winning designer.

As a budding entrepreneur with newfound recognition, Jenny knew Pippin Home Designs was going to need support and a community of peers. A tiny ad for AIBD jumped off the page of a seemingly insignificant publication. Jenny’s intuition told her this was the peer group she needed to grow her business. She became a Certified Professional Building Designer (CPBD) and learned the depth of resources AIBD had to offer. She grew her tribe by collaborating in the creation of the AIBD North Carolina Society, making these resources more readily available to her and other designers in her area. Her involvement with the organization grew to the national level and she became a National AIBD Board Director, a Chairperson of the High-Performance Homes Team, and eventually was named a Fellow of AIBD. At the time she was awarded this distinction, she was one of only three women to be given the title of Fellow.

Jenny also attributes her firm’s success to her partnership with husband, Wes Stearns. Wes brought valuable assets to the Pippin Home Design team with his skills in CADD, 3-D CADD, and his astute input as a professional photographer and artist. With their combined love for nature, they designed and built a Certified Green home and offered educational tours to the community.

Together this dynamic duo has grown Pippin Home Designs into a firm rooted in health, sustainability, love, and inspiration. Inspired by their own lives, Pippin Home Designs’ tagline, “You-Inspired for Joyful Living,” conveys their central focus of each design as a unique, one-of-akind creation inspired by the passions and lifestyle of each individual client.

They take their passion for inspiring joyful living one step further through their “You-Inspired Discovery Process,” that entails an intimate deep dive into the valuable elements of each of their clients’ lives. During an indepth conversation, Jenny studies her clients and gets to know what’s most important to them in reference to finance, desires, ease, comfort, health, love, happiness, and fun. This method has resulted in homes that are as extraordinary as their homeowners.

Where others see walls, Jenny has always seen windows, and this has contributed to her reputation for designing Award-Winning Luxury Homes with a View. The various homes she lived in taught her valuable lessons that inspired her to dive deeper into areas of the industry she felt were overlooked and underutilized. This has differentiated her skills as a Residential Designer with specialties that bring tremendous value to her clients. Each of her designs today are intentionally drawn to make the lives of each homeowner easier by utilizing the techniques of accessible and universal design in combination with sustainable, high-performance, and green design that is further enhanced by an intimate knowledge of her clients’ unique desires. Today she offers her clients options that facilitate a cohesive existence between habitat and home. Integrating her belief that “it’s all about the views” inside and out, she has become known as the designer able to maximize every angle for optimal viewing enjoyment. Over the past 35 years, Jenny has received more than 50 design awards from local, regional, and national competitions.

Visit Pippin Home Designs at: Click Here

Jenny Pippin

is a Certified Professional Building Designer and a Fellow of AIBD. She is also a Past-chairperson of AIBD’s High Performance Home Team