Last year, Michela, the publisher of "Dwell," said, "Zem, we have this house, and it's kind of sad. It doesn't have any furniture. It's a really wonderful story, but it would be so cool if we could actually furnish it and create a real home out of it. Is there any way you can do it in three weeks?" I was gonna say, "not," but I decided that it was a really good challenge, and it would be an incredibly exciting and wonderful project to work on. And so, we met the challenge, and it was fun and wonderful last year, and decided that we were up for the challenge again this year; and wanted to do it, especially this year, because we were able to really influence the design early on, which was, you know, a wonderful opportunity for us. I came up with the idea for Ecofabulous because I found it really challenging to find all of the eco-friendly products that I knew either existed or should exist. And, I really wanted to prove that style and sustainability could be harmoniously embodied in one product. My name's Tracen Gardner. I'm the co-founder of Reclaimed Space. We build modular homes from reclaimed materials. I have been in construction all of my life. I graduated from UT with a degree in environmental resource management, and I've always loved earth sciences and the idea of reuse, repurpose. I've always appreciated these materials, and knew that someday I would be able to do something with them; and I've been saving them for a long time. Tracen, my partner, we worked together in some landscape design, and he had a friend that has a demolition company, and they just had all of these materials piling up. And he said, "Well, I have this land and I want to make kind of a little cabin, and then I can just move out there, so I don't have to meet the contractors to build and go through all of that hassle." We started really realizing that the broad scope that this could have, from country living to camps to B and B's to, you know, all over the place. When we first started, you know, of course, you're brainstorming all over the place. Let's do this. Let's do that. And of course, this is sustainable. Let's capitalize on that. And, how do we take this to the next step? And we called up "Dwell" magazine, and said, "Hey, someone said you ought to be in 'Dwell.' Oh, okay, yeah, sure. The country boys out here. They don't want to listen to us." Well, two hours later, I got a phone call back from the president of "Dwell" magazine. She said, "When can I come down and visit you all?" I said, "Anytime. You know, we're wide open here." At the end of it, they invited us out to their convention out there. I thought, wow, what a great idea to showcase how we do everything. We're here in Shiner. We're in the 1880s livery stable for Shiner, Texas. Turns out Shiner needed to have this space for a water treatment facility to go ahead and expand. To keep it, they were gonna have to put $35-40,000 in repair in it, so they decided to look to taking it and selling it. Someone just happened to have our number with them, right there at the spot when Jimmy, over here at the brewery, decided to get this done. Here we are, we're paying for it. It's about four weeks later. More than enough material to do all kinds of stuff. So, we're gonna have to actually expand out storage facility just to house all of this. You know, I think, just a lot of people that are wanting to move towards, kind of, a smaller house movement; don't want the large house in the city, the big mansion. And, it's an easy and affordable process to have a complete home. And, you know, the fit in so well with nature. Often, you see this beautiful landscape, and you see this home that, that's a nice home, but it might stick out like a sore thumb. This is a very grassroots business. We started with just a couple of friends and put our money together. Each year, or each month, we can tell it's getting better and better. I don't think the concept of reclaimed is really a trend. Reusing used to be essential because, you know, when you're in a down economy, you have to reuse everything that you can, and, you know, everything has a value. The wood in this house would have ended up in a landfill. That's unconscionable. This is beautiful wood that, now, is a new home. I think that this is going to inspire people to rethink the way they think about waste.
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