About Drew Renshaw Builder
Our Mission Statement:
To honor God in all that we do.
To build fine homes for our clients that exude innate qualities of warmth, timelessness, and fine craftsmanship, while remaining mindful of time and budgetary constraints.
To provide a work environment that is enjoyable, encourages mutual respect and support of each other, and provides the financial resources needed for our employees and their families.
To continually learn new and innovative ways to emulate the past, implement new technologies, and satisfy our clients.
Our Philosophy:
When we begin any new project, we try to assign a particular age to the house and work out the details based on that time frame. A lot of our houses fall in the 200 year old range. We research building methods used 200 years ago so we can imitate them. Researched building techniques, and attention to detail along with appropriate materials are combined with good and historically correct architecture to create wonderful Drew Renshaw homes.
Any home built 200 years ago would not have electricity at first and would have been retrofitted with it later. The simplest method would have involved removing the baseboards and creating a chase for the wires down low behind the baseboard. Then holes were cut in the baseboards and electrical receptacles installed down where the wires were running. This is the real reason behind having the plugs in the baseboards, sure it looks nicer too, but that's not the history. Understanding the history of how houses have evolved and implementing according to that history is how we get our houses to look the part that they were designed to look. It is one thing to have the architect design a French farmhouse on paper; it is quite another to build the house in such a way as to convince the viewer that it looks so authentic that it could have been plucked from the French countryside.
An important building method we incorporate into our homes is the use of hewn beams. Since our particular house was built before electric saws, dimensional lumber was not available. The old method involved taking round logs and chiseling them square to be able to assemble a skeletal frame between which you would fill with some material to create a wall. The only way to make a round log into a square timber was to use a tool called a foot adze. When our timber man is making the timbers that we use in our houses he uses this same tool to leave the same marks that the original craftsmen had. Attention to details such as these is what sets our homes apart.
Brick that is smeared with a thin cement type coating has become a very popular look recently. We have been perfecting our slurried brick methods since 1998 and we have developed several techniques for different looks and levels of slurried brick. The reason we perform this application to the bricks is not because it makes the bricks look pretty, or uniform, or textured, although these things are true; the real reason dates back over 150 years. Long ago the bricks used to construct houses were not nearly as well made as modern day bricks. They were soft and porous with very little resistance to freezing. This issue in a cold climate such as northern France or caused the bricks to crumble. To keep their houses from crumbling the French would regularly patch coat their houses with a mortar mixture to keep the moisture out of the brick. After doing this for 150 years, most of the structures in northern France have this smeared on patch coat look, and some coatings are so thick they are more like stucco. When we now travel to France this is all that we see even though all of the houses started out as regular brick. Intentionally patching modern bricks is a design technique that we use to capture the wonderful patina of classical French homes.
These are only three details out of hundreds that we research from a historical perspective and are a big part of what makes our homes stand out from a sea of imitators. As you can see, we at Drew Renshaw, Builder are much more concerned about the art of creating a home than just building a place to stay. We build with our artist eyes rather than a mechanical methodology. When we do so we create individual works of art, not just houses for shelter. We are passionate about historical accuracy within budgetary realities, quality, fine old world craftsmanship, beauty, and legendary customer satisfaction.
Drew Renshaw, owner, is a graduate of Memphis University School, studied architecture at Mississippi State University, finished with finance degree from University of Memphis. Married with 3 children.
