A daydreamer who never stopped drawing.
I grew up in aviation. My father was a flight dispatcher, the person on the ground who plans the route, watches the weather and the fuel, and is responsible with the captain for getting every flight home safe. My brother flies commercially. I do neither. I build the place everyone is flying back to.
Charlotte, from age six
I was born in Pittsburgh and moved here at six, because my father wanted us to have a community while he was traveling. Charlotte is where he grew up. Same streets, same neighbors, same people who had known him since he was a kid. He was gone a lot, so I learned who my father was through his parents and his friends. That is the thing about a real neighborhood. It holds a family together when one person is away.
I repeated first grade. I was a daydreamer. I drew houses on notebook paper, scrolled listings studying doors and windows and garages, and climbed the bulldozers on the lot while our own house was going up. I shadowed a Charlotte architect for a while and worked out that it was 14 years to a license, which at that age felt like a lifetime. So I studied finance instead and never stopped designing.
The terminal
My first job in construction was with All Pro Builders on the Concourse A expansion at Charlotte Douglas, a $200 million terminal build. I ran sourcing, RFP development and vendor evaluation across more than 20 subcontractors and 500 people on site, and learned commercial discipline from Turner Construction, All Pro's partner on that project.
An airport terminal is not really a building. It is the room where people wait for each other. Every trip that starts there ends with somebody driving home. That is where I understood what I actually wanted to build, and it was not terminals.
A home is not where you are. It is what you come back to.
2018
My father passed in 2018. Then the world shut down. My family renovated my mother's house ourselves, my siblings and I in white Tyvek suits acting as our own general contractor, learning the trades in the order you learn them when nobody is coming to help. It is still the most useful education I have had.
A developer in the neighborhood consulted on that renovation and brought me into a group deal in Florence, South Carolina. We acquired 12 lots and built the first 3. Then I found a lot of my own, took it through a rezoning from 1 unit to 12, and delivered a $2.2 million project minutes from downtown. That was the first thing that was mine. I still call it my baby.
What One Signature is for
Most developers hire a builder. Most builders never carry the risk. We do both, which means the budget, the schedule and the craftsmanship all answer to the same name. That is the whole idea behind One Signature, and it is why the standard is written down rather than implied.
We buy the rare lot on a street people already love, in Charlotte's established neighborhoods, and build the home that belongs there. Finished, designed, warrantied, and ready to walk through before anyone buys it. Every home starts with the same question: where will everyone gather?
One signature stands behind everything a family sees when they walk through the front door. The day they move in, theirs joins it.
Chandler Chase is the founder of One Signature Developments and serves as a project manager with All Pro Builders & Restorations, the licensed general contractor delivering One Signature's builds.