Alicia Hylton-Daniel’s epiphany arrived in the aftermath of a 2002 house fire in Durham, North Carolina. Although an artist at heart, she had chosen the more practical path of working as a paralegal and studying for her LSAT exams. Then came a bang on her door in the middle of the night and a shout that her house was in flames. As she watched it burn, she suddenly realized she had no passion for the law. “The fire gave me a moment to reflect on how very unhappy I was at the time,” she says.

Later, working with her insurance company’s contractors, whom she describes as a “good ol’ boys” network, proved exasperating. But she became immersed in the building process, and a lightbulb went on. “It was like, ‘Can I do something in this field?’ ” she says. “I got really excited about going back to school for interior design at age thirty-one.” She headed to Meredith College in Raleigh and never looked back.

During a portfolio review in 2008, a Raleigh architect asked her to visit his firm the next day. When she did, she was offered a job. She stayed for seven years, mostly doing interior design for commercial office spaces and restaurants. Then, back in Durham at a different firm, working as a project manager/interior designer, she decided to take the general contractor’s exam. From there, she and her husband, Roger, set up their own design/build firm, in 2017. She handles the design, while he locates properties, secures funding, and minds the budget.

She’s been on a two-track design blitz in downtown Durham ever since. She has restored four postwar homes, each 1,000 square feet or less, and is renovating a 1920s mill house into a duplex that she intends to rent affordably to service workers, such as police officers, nurses, and public school teachers. At the same time, she has completed a series of three larger residences that she designed and built from scratch. Created to maximize efficiency on urban lots, they’re named Modernist 1, 2, and 3. Hylton-Daniel may have built them on spec, but her first priority, she says, was to enhance their neighborhoods rather than to maximize profits.

Each house replaced a worn-out building. After each teardown, she examined the site at different times of day and in different weather—even on rainy days. “Especially in this urban environment, with the views, I’ll study where to put glazing and where the kitchen needs to be,” she says. “It’s an emotional approach, about how I feel when I’m in the space.”

Her work is part of a transformation in downtown Durham, where Dukies (as those in the university milieu are known), townies, and Brooklyn expats— including the young, former DUMBO family who bought Modernist 3—mingle. “People here are savvy enough to get excited when contemporary architecture is done well,” she says.

Unsurprisingly, each of her Modernist homes fetched multiple offers after only a few days.

Project Credits:

Design: Hylton Daniel Design + Construction / @hylton_daniel

Photography: Mike Belleme / @mikebelleme