Holder, who answered a “we will teach you to build homes” ad from David Weekley 35 years ago and never once looked back, had put time in at Weekley, a pre-Lennar Village Builders, and—earlier—worked a stretch in politics for a Texas representative in Congress while he was in D.C. getting his MBA at George Washington University.

Holder’s been at Trendmaker for about half of the company’s 44 years in business, and has been getting a lot of things right in fiercely competitive markets swarming with home builders for a long time. Still, while most of the emphasis in the superheated Texas markets has been on pushing average selling prices up (which is where Trendmaker has been doing well all along), the TRI Pointe leadership wants Holder to explore stretching into mid- and lower-band price tiers as well.

“Nobody’s going to get away unscathed from the impact of the oil price crisis,” says Holder. Bauer, Mitchell, Grubbs, and the team see that “the Texas market is changing right now, so their leadership direction is appropriate and welcome. They’re getting us more capital to direct into new options, and they’re giving us more direction and a lot more discipline on matching our product to our land positions. We’re learning some new tricks and we’re seeing some real results start to take shape.”

Maracay’s Warren corroborates ways TRI Pointe’s discipline-centric, deep resources make his company a better competitor in an Arizona market where some of the biggest fish get into trouble because they can’t move nimbly enough in nor out of land commitments, and where the smaller private ones are boxed out of the action because they don’t have resources. “We’ve got the best of both worlds,” Warren says.

Sternlicht, who agreed at the time of the TRI Pointe/Weyerhaeuser transaction to stay on at TRI Pointe as chairman of the board, describes Bauer, Mitchell, and Grubbs as a not-too-hot-not-too-cold hybrid of boldness and caution.

“They’re like Goldilocks,” Sternlicht explains. “There’s not a great deal of skill in saying ‘no’ all the time, and there’s not a great deal of skill in saying ‘yes’ all the time. Doug, Tom, and Mike know when to be aggressive and when to be careful. And the best thing about them is they do what they say they’re going to do. That’s why people trust them.”

So, call TRI Pointe’s latest claim to fame among its peer companies—our 2014 Builder of the Year—the end of the beginning for a company born of pedigree and privilege. TRI Pointe comes so quickly of age by virtue of something else entirely, something more blue-collar, more earth-bound, more effortful than pedigree and privilege would yield.

How do you explain it, starting with three guys who woke up one day after successful careers of well over two decades eating, sleeping, and breathing the legend of William Lyon Homes, and deciding they’d like to level-set, from scratch, in the middle of the Great Recession? How in six years—and a few fell swoops—did what originated as those three guys’ scribbles on legal pads and a white board around a kitchen table become one of home building’s most powerful, geographically diversified, well-positioned organizations?

Alchemy?

Alchemy is a word you can hear in home building, as you might in any one of the financial investment-centered occupations. It tells of a hybrid blend of skills and talent—where business discipline and analytical acuity end, and a near-magical grasp of the path of consumer desire, a near-uncanny intuition on timing, and near-mystical power of negotiation persuasiveness begin. It might be said that TRI Pointe’s three top executives personify that hybrid blend.

Although the word alchemy may have an appealing ring to it—especially when an individual or an organization is on a good run—elixirs, sorcery, and magic are rarely, if ever, the stuff of the very real world of home building. It’s rather a world that lives in and takes its true meaning and value from dirt, from money changing hands, and from often-fickle people making up their minds, and doing what they say they’ll do. Or not.

Let’s not ever mistake what the people in home building do for alchemy. It’s too grueling, complex, and full of risk. It takes something different to make good happen, and there’s nothing metaphysical about it. It’s about trust.

“It sounds cliché, but it’s like we’ve got the best of both worlds, every bid as nimble and customer-service oriented as a private company can be, but with the powerful resources of marketing behind Linda Mamet and her team, Kevin Wilson and his national purchasing team, and great integrated systems, and collaborative processes, best-practices, and on-hand capital to grow,” says Warren, Maracay’s president. “And with Doug, Tom, and Mike, it’s a self-fueling spiral, around culture, which means we can hire better talent. We can keep super-charging the business.”