I don’t mean “build” like a metaphor. I mean I actually build things.
I design buildings. I develop property. I take real materials and put them together in real places and make spaces that people live their whole lives inside.
The first house I ever designed, I designed on a fogged-up car window. When I was nine years old.
We were driving home from my grandmother’s in Hendersonville in the rain. My mother was in the front seat. Brooke was asleep in her car seat next to me. And the back window fogged up.
I put one finger on the glass. And I drew a house.
Big windows. A fireplace with a chimney. A porch. Rooms that felt like somebody had thought about them. Like somebody cared what it would feel like to be inside them.
The fog started to evaporate almost right away. The house faded.
So I drew it again.
Three times, maybe four. On the same window. Watching it disappear each time. Drawing it again.
My mother turned around in the front seat.
“Miranda. Stop drawing on the window.”
“Okay,” I said.
I stopped drawing on the window.
But I kept the house in my head.
That was twenty-two years ago. I still have it. Not the exact same house. It’s grown and changed through every building I’ve designed since. But the feeling behind it. The nine-year-old’s finger on the glass. The belief that a house could be made a certain way, for certain reasons, and the way it was made would decide how it felt to live inside it.
That belief has been with me since I was old enough to have it.
After college, I worked for four years at a big commercial development firm in Asheville. Blue Ridge Partners. I was good at it. I learned everything. Zoning. Permitting. Construction financing. How to read a soils report. How to talk to a bank.
And I watched that firm make decisions that weren’t nearly as smart as the firm thought they were. Cutting corners on windows. Cheap materials. Rooms designed for the listing photos instead of for the people who’d actually live in them.
When I was twenty-six, I quit.
I took out a forty-thousand-dollar SBA loan from First Citizens Bank, with my car as collateral. I filed the paperwork for Holt Ridge Developments, LLC, with the North Carolina Secretary of State on a Tuesday. A hundred and twenty-five dollar filing fee.
I started at a folding table in my one-bedroom apartment in West Asheville. My kitchen counter was the conference room.
Nobody came to my launch. There wasn’t one. I bought myself a cupcake from the Whole Foods and ate it at the folding table.
I didn’t call my parents to tell them. I’d stopped doing that by then.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.