If you have spent any time browsing house plans online, you have almost certainly seen Donald A. Gardner Architects! The Upstate South Carolina firm has been designing plans for builders and homeowners since 1978. We build their designs around Lake Anna often enough that “Don Gardner” comes up early in most of our consultations.
We’ve put countless homes of their plans in Spotsylvania, Orange, and Louisa counties, so we thought it was worth sharing a bit of the backstory! Who Don Gardner is, why their plans tend to translate well to Central Virginia, and what we typically change before the first footing gets poured.
Who Donald A. Gardner Architects Is
Donald A. Gardner founded the firm in 1978 and went full-time by 1984. He came to it with an architecture degree from Clemson, time in the Army Corps of Engineers, and over a decade of practice at other firms (per the firm’s about page).
The firm is still based in the Greenville community in Upstate South Carolina, and the plan library has grown into the thousands of stock designs over the decades.
If you have read interviews with their team, they actively resist being pigeonholed into a single style. In a conversation on Houseplans.com, the firm’s Architectural Department Manager, Jonathan B. Hyman, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, puts it directly: “DAGA designs luxury European homes, simple farmhouses and just about everything in between.” Hyman attributes some of the range to geography. “Greenville is between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean,” he says, “it gives us close access to coastal and beach housing styles, as well as rustic and mountain styles.”
And they pay attention to how people live: open dining, flex rooms that adapt as kids grow up or move out, kitchens that face the gathering space.
Why These Plans Fit Central Virginia
Greenville’s climate looks a lot like ours: humid summers, freeze-thaw winters, plenty of storms. The plans were drawn for the kind of conditions we build in around Lake Anna every day.
A few features show up across the catalog that make sense locally:
- Covered porches, front and back. Useful for shade in July, useful for rain in October, useful for sitting outside on a Lake Anna evening without getting eaten alive by mosquitoes!
- Open kitchen-to-great-room layouts with a clear line of sight from the cooktop to wherever the kids or grandkids are. Most of the buyers we work with (retirees from NoVA or DC, weekenders from Richmond, families relocating from Northern Virginia) want exactly this.
- Flex rooms. Office today, guest bedroom in two years, hobby room after that. Don Gardner plans typically include one or two spaces that can be repurposed without remodeling.
- Single-level living, or single-level with bonus space above. A large share of our retiree clients want master-on-main, and the catalog leans heavily in that direction.
- Walkout basement and crawl space variants of many plans, useful in a region where lot slope varies plot to plot and a basement is sometimes a feature and sometimes a budget killer.
None of these features are exotic. They are just thoughtful, and they tend to age well.
The 13 Don Gardner Plans We Build
We carry thirteen Don Gardner plans in our active catalog:
- The Somersby
- The Lucy
- The Markham
- The Calypso
- The Morrison
- Applemoor
- The Satchwell
- The Hardesty
- The Westlake
- Ella
- Solstice Springs
- The Steeplechase
- The Whitcomb
Each one has its own gallery of completed Spartan builds and a plan-detail page on our site. If you want to browse them in detail, our Don Gardner hub has every one of them.
One thing worth knowing up front: when we build a Don Gardner plan, the stock drawings are the starting point, not the finish. We modify the structure, finishes, mechanical package, and often the layout itself before the first footing gets poured. More on that below.
Three Don Gardner Builds That Show the Range
The Somersby
A four-bedroom plan with a 22-by-18 great room under a cathedral ceiling, a main-floor master that opens onto the rear porch, and a finished walkout basement that brings total living area to roughly 2,900 square feet. Multiple gable pitches, twin dormers, front and rear porches, plus a screened porch. We have built it several times around Lake Anna, each one meaningfully different in lot slope, siding mix, and kitchen footprint. The plan as drawn is a strong baseline, and it accommodates customization remarkably well!
The Markham
A one-story plan around 2,500 square feet on the main level, with another 742 square feet of unfinished bonus space tucked above a three-car garage. The exterior leans on multiple gables and arches, the screened porch sits off the dining room with its own fireplace, and the master suite includes a sitting area with back-porch access. We have built it in configurations both with and without the bonus room finished out.
The Lucy
A more compact one-story footprint than the Markham, around 2,240 square feet on the main level, with an optional 566 square feet of bonus space available. The plan leans on a spacious great room, an open kitchen with island, dual walk-in closets in the primary suite, and a screened porch with a cathedral ceiling, skylights, and a fireplace. We point at the Lucy when a buyer wants Don Gardner styling at a more controlled square-footage budget.
What We Typically Modify on a Don Gardner Build
This is where the value of going through a custom builder shows up.
Every home we build, regardless of the underlying plan, gets put through the Spartan Standard. That means a few specific things.
Structural engineering on every home. A stock plan ships with general engineering details, but every lot is different. We get an engineer’s stamp on the framing for the site conditions.
NGBS Silver Level minimum. We are a multi-year National Green Building Standard Partner of Excellence (going back to 2016), and we do not build below NGBS Silver. It shows up in lower bills and a home that holds up better over time.
Floors built to feel solid. A code-minimum floor framing job technically passes inspection, but you can typically feel the difference walking across a room. We upgrade the floor system on Don Gardner plans the way we do on every other plan, so the floors feel quiet and solid underfoot.
HVAC sized to the home. Oversized HVAC is one of the most common issues we find on homes we walk through before a renovation. An oversized system kicks on and off too quickly, runs loud, and struggles with humidity through a Central Virginia summer. We size the HVAC for the home we are building.
Foundation tuned to the soil. Clay shows up in pockets across Spotsylvania, Orange, and Louisa counties, and a foundation built for a clay lot looks different from one built for a sandy or rocky one. We match the foundation and drainage to what the soil report shows for the lot.
Third-party inspection. Independent of the county inspection. We pay for a separate set of eyes on every build.
We also typically upgrade trim, window sizing, soft interior corners, and the molding package above what most builder-grade specs call for. A local home inspector who has walked a lot of our homes told us they generally rank in the top one to two percent of builds he sees, despite our mid-range pricing. The plan is part of that. The execution is most of it!
Build a Don Gardner Plan With Spartan
If a Don Gardner plan has caught your eye and you are thinking through a build around Lake Anna, we would be glad to walk you through what one of them looks like in person. Our model home and design center sits on Route 208 near Lake Anna Winery. You can browse the full Don Gardner catalog any time on our Don Gardner page. When you are ready for a conversation, the contact page is the easiest start, or call (540) 895-9966.