A custom home built in unincorporated Douglas County was featured in an interior design trade magazine and received a certification from an organization focused on healthy living spaces.

The ranch-style home, located in the Fox Hill community in Franktown, was also featured in a miniseries on Youtube and Amazon Prime created by House Beautiful, the interior design magazine. Eleven designers from across the country collaborated on the concept.

The home includes four bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, three laundry rooms, five fireplaces and a full “boomer suite” for aging parents, said Nick Nettleton, custom builder for the home and owner of Nicholas Custom Homes. 

“It was very rewarding to see it all come together,” he said.

The house is now up for sale and listed at nearly $3 million, according to the Fox Hill website.

The 5,400-square-foot home is located on a 1.8-acre lot in Fox Hill, a community that provides residents access to a fully operational farm with apple and pear orchards, a berry patch, eggs and honey.

Wellness Within Your Walls, a certification that guides consumers and professionals on healthier measures for home design and construction, gave the Fox Hill house its first ever full accreditation, according to a news release on the project. 

In order to acquire this accolade, the builders met requirements of a 10-step approach to ensure health and wellness in the home. The 10 steps focus on providing clean air and water, enhanced exposure to natural light, the removal of unnecessary chemicals and toxins in the home, physical wellness attributes, conscious consumption, mental wellness, spiritual wellness, food science, behavioral strategies and positive lifestyle habits, according to the news release.

“It starts from the ground up,” Nettleton said. “We’re trying to make the house as healthy to live in as living in the wilderness. We didn’t want the house to cause any negative health effects.”

Nettleton’s team accomplished this by implementing several techniques like using all sealed-combustion appliances, which improves efficiency and safety of those items. They also only used building materials that don’t have harmful volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which can have adverse health impacts.

They built the house with a full water filtration system — complete with a water softener and a UV light — to remove everything from the drinking water including any bacteria or chlorine. The furnaces were also made to ensure the air is as clean as possible.

“It makes sure that the air you’re breathing is very healthy and allergen and bacteria free,” he said.

Nettleton said not many homes have these features yet.

“I do think it’s getting more popular, especially with COVID-19,” he said. “I think a lot of people have realized they spend a lot of time at their home and being made aware of healthier living in general.”

The company broke ground on the project at the end of March 2020 and it was completed in August of that year. 

“It was a struggle to build an almost 6,000-square-foot house with (11) designers in four and a half months,” Nettleton said. “With the COVID-19 situation, that made it much more challenging.”

Nettleton said his company plans to only build homes that meet the Wellness Within Your Walls certification going forward. 

“It was an exciting process for us,” he said. “We’ve never done something like this before.”