When you're raised by a dad who builds houses, you might think there'd be some expectation that becoming a homeowner yourself means supporting the family business. So when Lauren Spinelli bought her first home in Anchorage, she caused a little bit of family drama.
"It wasn't a Spinell home," Spinelli said. "It drove Dad crazy."
That's because "Dad" is Chuck Spinelli -- and if that name sounds familiar, it's because the family business, Spinnell Homes Inc., has built more than 3,200 homes in Southcentral Alaska since its founding in 1987. That's nearly one home every three days for nearly 30 years.
But Chuck Spinelli has built something besides houses. In a state with one of the nation's highest population turnover rates, where fewer than half of its residents were born in the state and leaders look for solutions to "brain drain" as high-achieving students are lured to Outside colleges and career opportunities, he has built a multigenerational family business, with two of his three adult children now poised to take the reins.
Originally from California, Chuck and Jackie Spinelli were dispatched to Anchorage by Chuck's employer in 1984. High construction costs -- and the 1986 oil bust -- caused the company to go bankrupt a couple of years after the family's arrival, so Spinelli kept building houses under his own name.
"I didn't really have a choice," Chuck said. "I needed a livelihood."
Like other Alaska parents, the Spinellis watched their children grow up and move out of state to pursue new opportunities. But then something unexpected happened: The kids came back.
Andre, the eldest, started working for the company at 15, cleaning up work sites and doing odd jobs, but after high school he took off for the Pacific Northwest, attending Portland State University for a year and then dabbling in professional snowboarding.
"I had a friend that said, 'Let's go to Bellingham and be snowboarders!'" Andre recalled. "He went on to be a megastar snowboarder, so sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision. But I made a conscious decision to come back and do Spinell Homes."
Andre came back to Alaska and started doing design work for his dad.
"He taught himself how to engineer a house plan," Chuck Spinelli said.
Since then, Andre has become a certified Green Builder Professional and a member of the board of directors of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. He has also served as president of the Anchorage Home Builders Association.
His long-term goal for the company is simple: "I just want to keep building homes in Anchorage -- (where space) is on the verge of extinction."
With limited acreage in the Anchorage Bowl, high-rise housing, as well as taking more of their business to the Mat-Su, seems inevitable.
"There is a lot of developable land left in Anchorage -- it's just challenging," Andre said, referring to lots with organic soil and drainage issues. "I want to keep identifying places to build here in Anchorage, without being the guy who mowed down a park."
As for Lauren, after graduation, "She kissed us goodbye and said she was never coming back," Chuck said, laughing. "She said, 'I'm going home (to California) where I belong.'"
After earning a degree in special education from the University of Redlands, though, Lauren came back to Anchorage. She did some substitute teaching, worked in retail -- and had no intention of entering the family business. She's now settled in Anchorage, with two small children and an integral role in the company. What changed for her?
"I wanted to buy a house, and I couldn't do that," Lauren said.
After joining the company, gaining financial stability, and "getting sucked in," she did buy that house -- a small ranch-style home in the nearby Turnagain neighborhood. A non-Spinell home. At least, at first.
"Dad did remodel the house," she said. "He started with a leak in the bathroom, and then he called me one day and said, 'Hey, is it OK if I replace all the windows?'" Since then, she's designed two houses for herself -- both Spinell-built.
Lauren didn't leave education behind. As the lead customer liaison, she communicates the homebuilding progress with buyers from design to closing.
"Instead of teaching kids, now I teach adults about their houses," she said. "I want to keep customers that started with a condo and stay with them to their dream home."
As Chuck and Jackie move toward retirement, a natural transition is beginning to take place. Andre and Lauren will buy into the company this year, becoming vice presidents of design and development, and sales and marketing, respectively. The brother-sister pair say they work well enough together as business partners, but they are still siblings, nonetheless.
"We both have that hothead, Italian anger," Lauren said. "But we alternate days. We're not always yelling at the same time."
"It can get feisty at times," Andre agreed. "Sometimes professional limits get left behind."
"Lindsey would add balance," Lauren said of their younger sister, an account executive for a local advertising agency and one of this year's Alaska Journal of Commerce Top 40 under 40 recipients. "And we could just do so much more."
There's one problem: "Lindsey says, 'I could never work with Andre,'" Lauren admitted, laughing.
As buildable space dwindles, the population swells, and infrastructure ages, the next generation of Spinellis is preparing for the role they'll play in the ever-evolving Anchorage housing market -- and working on ways to balance the realities of the local market with clients' expectations of what an Alaska home should be.
"My impression, when people come to Anchorage, is that they want to live in a house with a two-car garage or in a log cabin," Chuck said. "It's what my kids want. They want the Alaska dream."
This story appeared in the March 2015 issue of 61º North Magazine. Contact 61º editor Jamie Gonzales at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.