With his dad, uncle, and cousins all involved in building homes in Eugene, Springfield, and nearby environs over the years, Eugene native Scott Jordan clearly saw his future. He chuckles and says, “How could I not be a builder?”
Today, the company he founded in 1991, Jordan & Jordan Construction, is known for building high-quality custom homes at mid-range prices. He doesn’t build to showcase a particular style. Rather, he listens to his clients to learn their “dreams and desires.” “I try to balance those out with all the other factors, and make their visions come true,” Jordan says, breaking into a broad smile. “One of my greatest satisfactions is watching the delight on their faces when it’s a family’s move-in time.”
Creating Delight
The trait of delighting people is something he picked up early on from his uncle, Don Windheim, a homebuilder here from the 1960s to eight years ago. When he worked with Windheim as a teen on some of his housing projects, the young Jordan remembers seeing the joy of clients moving into new homes that were more than what they expected. Creating customer happiness like that was a major goal for his uncle. “I remember the first home he built along the McKenzie River,” Jordan says. “It was a beautiful riverfront residence with impressive cedar paneling. He worked hard to get the features the new owners wanted. I’ll never forget seeing so much joy and excitement from the family. I thought to myself, ‘I really want to do this too, build homes that I’m proud of and make people happy.’”
It’s been his mantra for 32 years. One key to his success was purposefully going small. Jordan builds about five homes a year. He’s the sole employee of his company, and he enjoys working with a small cadre of subcontractors he respects and trusts. “That’s how I keep quality high,” he says. “You won’t find me doing any 50- or 100-home subdivisions.”
Jordan’s personal expertise is carpentry. That’s what he has loved all his life and what he was exposed to as a kid. A stint as an Air Force mechanic after graduating from Junction City High School in 1982 gave him additional skills that he applies in his work every day. After leaving the Air Force in 1986, he plunged back into residential construction as a carpenter, mostly for remodels throughout California — “solariums from Beverly Hills to Santa Barbara,” he says. But he wanted to venture out on his own, and he came back home to do that.
Now, at 59, Jordan has gradually retreated from the physical challenges of building to concentrate more on guiding the enterprise. But he is a master finisher carpenter, and sometimes he just needs to raise a hammer himself. For the past several years, his projects have been new construction. “But it depends,” he adds. “When I started out, just about every job was a remodel. When money and land are less available, remodels come on, and we may see that again soon.”
Custom Touches
Once homeowners have experienced working with Jordan, they are likely to come back. Tammy and Chad Tracewell have brought on Jordan for three projects. In 2017, Jordan built them a two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,200-square-foot custom ADA-compliant home with wider doors and hallways and handrails in the Ferry Street Bridge area, when Chad’s mother resided with them. The second project was an addition to their former home, enlarging the garage and adding a second-story finished bonus room. Their current home, in Elmira, was completed last December. The Tracewells are known around town as “the people who built a shop twice the size of their house,” laughs Tammy.
The shop, with a half-bath and fully heated and cooled interior, holds the Tracewells’ camping and rafting equipment and a small collection of motorcycles. Chad transformed the shop’s first bay into an entertainment space with his neon beer sign collection, three TVs for catching all of the football games, a bar, and plenty of bar-top seating. “We have always enjoyed being the gathering place for our family and friends for sporting events, holidays, or just to gather around the fire and have a cold beer,” says Tammy.
Jordan also gave them a large, “fabulous” covered patio with a television, gas stone fireplace, outdoor shower, and plenty of seating for entertaining, Tammy says. “It’s the perfect outdoor kitchen and dining area,” she adds. “Jordan made sure that we had every detail covered for our outdoor living needs.”
The outdoor living area includes “a gorgeous overhang off of the shop in addition to our big covered patio out back, so we’ve got multiple outdoor living spaces,” Tammy says. “Hands down, what we’ve accomplished with those spaces has exceeded our expectations, and I give all the compliments to Scott.”
The interior of the home is 2,338 square feet with four bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. The layout creates a large open area with privacy for the bedrooms and bathrooms. One favorite feature is the “hidden” pantry in the kitchen, an idea Tammy found on Instagram. “It’s such a fun addition to our kitchen!” she says. “It looks like a cabinet from the outside, but you open the cabinet doors and there’s a fantastic surprise with a large walk-in pantry and tons of storage.” Another favorite feature is the primary shower, with the floor tile running into the floor of the shower, incorporating a linear drain that is hidden beneath two beautiful glass shower doors. The fourth bedroom, known as The Crow’s Nest, is located above the garage, with its own separate entrance and large half bath.
Jordan built another large garage as part of a custom home in Marcola — this 3,500-square-foot house got a 3,500-square-foot garage with a hard-working and good-looking epoxy floor. For Craig Stebbins’s home in the Gilham area of Eugene, Jordan installed floating stairs with a cable rail. “The open space is really the selling feature for me, but the stairwell is probably the focal point in the room,” says Stebbins. “The stairwell has black stainless wiring and you really don’t even see the wiring. It’s pretty cool.”
Modest, Open, Stylish
To get a good idea of Jordan’s work and sensibilities, look no further than the new home he built for himself a year and a half ago south of Springfield. “I wanted to find a spot where you get a feeling of being in the country when you’re not,” he says. “For outside, I wanted a nice big yard and space between my neighbors.” He got that and took care of the rest.
At first glance, his single level, 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath home with office, garage, and detached shop appears quite modest. But as you walk in, you quickly get immersed in the comfort and style of a marvelous great room bathed in attractive neutral colors. He personally loves casual openness inside a home and showcases that. “I’m not a fan of that 1970s style of walling off dining rooms, kitchens, and living rooms,” he explains. One area nestles a kitchen and dining space. On the other side is the spacious family room framed by a large fireplace adorned above with a set of bull horns. His preference for soft hues is also noticeable throughout. “Colors go in and out of style,” he says. “So my question to myself is, ‘Will I like this 10 years from now?’ Keeping it light and neutral is my answer.”
Jordan’s sanctum at his home is his detached shop. Up the hill is a 3,000-square-foot home he finished earlier this year. The gathering spots there are the oversized three-car garage and large bonus room above it. “Both those areas mean a lot to the family,” Jordan says. “Those are their happy places and where they spend a lot of time.” Other custom tweaks include a professional-grade stainless steel dog wash in the mud room with a ramp for the family’s three dogs, accommodations for kitchen appliances tailored to the type of cooking they do, and an accompanying butler’s pantry to keep clutter off counters. “The dog wash is something you don’t see in a lot of houses,” says Jordan. “I worked with the architect and added it to the house.”
Both homes show off Jordan’s open, airy approach — and his deeply ingrained commitment to using his craft to make a house into a special, personal dream home.
“For me, there’s something deeply satisfying in building homes,” he says. “You see and feel your work take shape before you. When you build a home, six months later people will live in it. You can’t get more real and down-to-earth than that.”
