How Ben and Erin Napier Renovated an Entire Town for Home Town Takeover

One can’t help but admire the fact that HGTV has a show with just about every premise under the sun. But Home Town Takeover, which premiered earlier this month, might be one of the network’s most interesting undertakings. The show is a spinoff of the hugely popular Home Town, in which husband-and-wife duo Ben and Erin Napier renovate houses in their native Laurel, Mississippi.

This time, the Napiers searched the country for another town in need of a facelift, with the goal of renovating the entire place within one television season. They settled on Wetumpka, Alabama, which has a population of roughly 8,371 and is about half an hour north of the state capital, Montgomery. They began the four-month project in September of 2020.

Driving there for the first time, Erin tells AD she was struck by the “majestic” Coosa River and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. But upon closer inspection, the town had plenty of defunct businesses and damage that was caused by a devastating tornado in 2019. When deciding which homes and businesses they would renovate, “we had to find the best people who were doing the most for that town,” says Ben. Fittingly for a show about a small town, their producers mainly relied on word of mouth to find worthy candidates and a local contractor to handle the construction. “Those people don’t put themselves out there. They don’t think they deserve any kind of credit, and that is why they deserve all the credit,” says Erin.

In the end, the Home Town Takeover team settled on 12 homes and businesses to renovate, including the Tapp18 boutique, the home of a young couple who regularly takes in foster children, a barbershop, and an historic home in the center of town that is best known for its appearance in the 2003 Tim Burton film Big Fish.

As if this show wasn’t ambitious enough, the Napiers also brought in other HGTV personalities and celebrities along the way, including Food Network star Eddie Jackson, Say Yes to the Dress host Randy Fenoli, Tamara Day, Steve Ford, Wendell Holland, Dave and Jenny Marrs, Jasmine Roth, Mina Starsiak Hawk, Jon-Pierre and Mary Tjon-Joe-Pin, Ty Pennington, and even (drumroll please) Grammy-winning singer Sheryl Crow, who gives the town an outdoor concert in the first episode.

Her involvement happened quite organically, according to the Napiers. Crow’s own home is an antique-filled Nashville compound which AD visited in 2019, and which she decorated herself. But as a fan of Home Town, she reached out to the Napiers to see if they’d help her design “some old airstreams,” explains Erin. “We connected over that. Then when the pandemic happened, all that got put on hold. But she had told us, ‘If you ever have a need where I can help, I am so passionate about small-town rebirth, and I know that is what you care about too.’ So we had the opportunity to work with her.”

The show is incredibly heartwarming, though some viewers may wonder if renovating is really enough to save businesses from the threat of Amazon and economic downturn. That remains to be seen, but the Napiers have an extremely positive outlook. “A lot of people right now talk about Amazon and the internet taking business from mom-and-pop shops, but before that it was big-box stores, and before that it was shopping malls, and before that it was catalogues. Going back forever, there was always something that was going to put the mom-and-pop business out, but we are still here and we still bring something to the table,” says Ben.

Erin thinks the end of the pandemic could spark a small-business boom. “People are ready to have real experiences again. We are ready to do things, go places, see things, touch things. This is the year maybe when small-town America gets to shine,” she says.

At the very least, Home Town Takeover is shining a light on Wetumpka specifically. “It has been so wonderful,” says Erin. “Every day we were meeting people who were like, Thank you for believing in Wetumpka.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest