America is staying put. With interest rates doing their best impression of a brick wall and coastal South Carolina land becoming as scarce as a parking spot at the Promenade in Bluffton.
Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies projects home renovation spending exceeded $500 billion in 2025, and it is still rising. South Carolina leads the nation in homeowners choosing to "live in longer" after making improvements. People aren't moving. They're transforming.
I understand this deeply. Personally. Maybe even a little painfully. But this is not a cautionary tale.
In 2004, I built a house on Callawassie Island. It is a small, achingly-beautiful barrier island tucked between Bluffton and Beaufort that most people have never heard of, which is precisely why those of us who love it would like to keep it that way.
I built it in the same year my wife was pregnant with our first child, I had just quit my job and was busy launching what would become Court Atkins Group. Looking back, the only logical explanation is that I was experiencing some kind of acute optimism disorder. Reasonable people do not do these things simultaneously.
We raised two children in that house. Wonderful, energetic children who, it turns out, are not particularly gentle on architecture.
By the time we admitted the house needed serious attention, "renovation" was perhaps too polite a word. It needed an intervention. Oh, it also needed a proper wine cellar!
Peter Mayle, one of my favorite authors, wrote memorably about his own renovation trials in the south of France, where the phenomenon of the vanishing subcontractor is well known. I can confirm the phenomenon is not limited to Provence.
What began as a "short renovation" stretched into twenty-one months. Twenty-one. My wife, who married an architect under the reasonable assumption that this would confer some professional advantage in home improvement situations, remains remarkably gracious about the entire ordeal. Our builder, who for the record was excellent, survived my crazy ideas. And the talented members of our studio team who poured their creativity into transforming this space have my undying gratitude.
But here is what came out the other side: a home that finally, genuinely, feels like us. Not the 2004 us, stretched thin and running on caffeine and ambition. The us we've actually become – the full, layered, lived-in version.
That is what a great renovation does. It doesn't just fix a house. It listens to who you are now, and builds toward it.
That is, come to think of it, exactly what we do for our clients every day. So, if you are staying put because moving simply isn't the right answer, we know how to find the next chapter hiding inside your existing walls.
Wine cellars (as always) are optional, but encouraged.
Thinking about staying and transforming? Let's talk. It doesn’t have to take twenty-one months either. I promise ;)
-William Court
Resources:
https://www.myfinancialprograms.com/research/home-renovation/
https://www.empower.com/the-currency/life/renovation-rebound-home-remodeling-on-the-rise-news
Photography: Kelli Boyd Photography
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