Real Estate Investor Willie Coleman Focuses on Future with West End Home

Real estate investor Willie Coleman approaches each project with a guiding principle: “Put perfection first, and the profit will follow.”

With his first new-construction home, The Ware House in Greenville’s West End, the 23-year-old also wanted to focus on the future. “Greenville’s very progressive; it’s got a lot of influences,” he says. “I thought, ‘How can we make something that looks like what we preach?’”

The contemporary-style home has innovative upgrades—added in ways that will evolve with changing technology—and thoughtful design touches throughout its six-bedroom, six-bath layout.

From drawer-located charging spots and Alexa-controlled systems to the centrally located elevator, sound-proof theater room, and spa-like bathrooms, each aspect of the home is geared toward convenience and luxury living. “It was important for everything to be seamless and integrated,” says Coleman, who worked with his mother, Adrienne, to select finishes that were both sleek and created warmth.

His love of real estate started at age 11 when his family moved to Greenville, and his parents began a single-family residential fix-and-flip company after they had both served in the Navy. “I was home-schooled and always around them, learning about construction,” he says. “They were a great, great influence on my start.”

He worked to connect buyers and sellers at 15, first bought properties at 18, and since has completed 90-plus deals across the Upstate. “What gets me going is the idea of ‘We did it right,’ and . . . just the true impact of people being happy with their house,” he says. “We take things down to the studs and redo everything from A to Z.”

The pivot to new construction came after a 2022 European trip Coleman took to avoid near burnout. “Every time I travel, I try to get inspiration from my Airbnb or hotel,” he says. “I came back with the mental clarity of wanting to create fun projects and just started drawing.”

He sketched design ideas and the layout on his iPhone before a structural engineer completed blueprints for city permits and construction. He used his phone for 2a.m. moments of inspiration, but that will not be a repeated practice. He says it was one of the many lessons learned during the 13-month project.

“I almost see this as a work of art,” he says, noting its quality construction and multiple unique details. “I went creative, and we followed a budget, but it was not done like I’ve done everything else. It was a mind-shift.”

Coleman has called The Ware House home while waiting to put it on the market this spring. He says living there has provided answers “about where we did a great job and how we can do better” on perfecting and innovating future projects.

“It’s not really about Ware Street. This is about what we’re bringing to Greenville and the standard we’re setting for the city,” he adds.

See more of The Ware House on Instagram @thewarehousegvl or via Coleman’s account @willie.coleman.

The Ware House by the Numbers

Six bedrooms and six full bathrooms spread across 5,600 square feet; two are primary suites
Three floors, accessible via a centrally located glass-door elevator or stairways with commercial-grade glass-and-steel railings. Coleman tucked a back-lit wine-storage room with quartzite walls under the stairway between the second and third floors.
Three kitchens: Besides the main kitchen, there is a second full kitchen with Fisher & Paykel appliances on the third floor and an outdoor kitchen on the large covered porch.
Three outdoor living spaces: The third-floor covered porch offers views of downtown and Paris Mountain. The street-facing third-floor balcony and a balcony off the second-floor primary suite both provide an intimate seating space.
One theater room, hidden behind a custom feature wall
22 feet: the height of the living room’s ceiling. The ceiling throughout the rest of the first floor and the second floor is 10 feet, while the third floor has 9-foot ceilings.
Four electric vehicle chargers
168 small square DMF-brand LED recessed ceiling lights. “There are miles of electrical wire in this house,” Coleman says.

From the Ground Up

Willie Coleman filled The Ware House with innovations, impressive design touches, and what he says are “the simple things that make sense.” Among them are:

The crawl space was encapsulated with a higher-grade polyethylene barrier before being sealed with spray-foam insulation to make the house air-tight and keep out bugs and other pests. As part of the process, a whole-house dehumidifier was installed.
The house has an infinite hot water loop. “It allows you to have hot water instantly at any tap. We had our plumber run a loop from the two tankless water heaters to every supply line throughout the house,” Coleman says, including the pot filler faucet above the kitchen’s Fisher & Paykel gas range.
The kitchen’s upper cabinets have a European shelf system to maximize storage and create accessibility. Its pull-down levers, hidden behind the doors, lower the shelves for easy access.
The butler’s pantry, hidden behind a smooth panel door in the kitchen, has what’s been termed a grocery or Costco door. It is an opening in the garage that connects directly to one of the pantry’s cabinets, allowing for the easy unloading of groceries, particularly bulk items, from the car. “I saw this randomly online,” Coleman says, adding that it’s predicted to be one of 2025’s top home design trends.
In the mudroom, Coleman added plugs and USB sockets inside a drawer to keep mobile devices out of sight when charging.
The exterior features hose hydrants from Aquor Water Systems. Recessed into the wall, they provide instant, leak-free water access by plugging in a special hose connector. The hydrants also prevent freezing.
Sonos speakers were incorporated into the ceiling in multiple rooms, and music can be played via a WiFi-connected phone or by accessing Alexa on one of the house’s Amazon Echo hubs. The hubs—one is wall-mounted just outside the first-floor primary suite—also control exterior cameras, utilities, and other smart systems.
Five bathrooms feature Kohler smart toilets with heated seats and bidet functions. The two primary bathrooms have heated floors and no-curb showers (they are level with the rest of the room’s flooring). The showers’ lighting can change colors at the push of a button.
During construction, Coleman decided to hardwire Cat-6 ethernet cables throughout the house for faster Internet and TV streaming and add ceiling-mounted wireless access points from Ubiquiti Networks, a technology company. “They are like mini routers; we have two on each floor. They were integrated when we did the electrical rough-in,” he says. “You have amazing coverage; as technology evolves, they will integrate beautifully.”
The third-floor theater room, hidden behind a feature wall, was specially framed and insulated to prevent sound transfer. “We can have this at max volume, and you’ll hear nothing outside,” Coleman says, adding that he achieved his wish for it “to feel like a real theater” by adding an acoustically transparent screen, 13 speakers, two subwoofers, and a projector built into the wall between the room and media room behind it.

Willie Coleman Collaboratations

Coleman worked with several local companies during the project, including The Cook’s Station, Up2Us Furniture, Upstate Granite, and Eurobox, a cabinetry company.
The house features a curated collection of artworks installed by Devinci House, a contemporary nomadic art gallery, and Kara Soper, director of The Grand Bohemian Gallery, where Devinci House has held exhibitions.
The second-floor laundry room features two washer-dryer sets. One set is elevated off the floor via cabinetry and includes a pull-out shelf for a laundry basket; the second is topped with a quartzite counter for folding clothes. “The room makes you want to do laundry,” Coleman says.
The first-floor primary bedroom has a separate thermostat. “You could have heat on in here and cold air in the living spaces or whatever temperature you want to be comfortable,” says the builder, adding that each Nest thermostat in the house is recessed into the wall thanks to a Canadian product he discovered while traveling there.
Coleman raises the kitchen cabinets height from the standard 36 inches to 38 inches. “It’s just a little bit more comfortable,” he says, adding that the countertops are quartzite.
With its epoxy-coated floors, wall-mounted speakers, and unique low-voltage ceiling lighting, the garage was designed to double as an entertaining space. “We’re downtown. We don’t have a ton of outdoor space,” Coleman says, adding that it also has spray-foam insulation so that a separate heating and cooling system could be added in the future.
A custom metal chandelier was installed over the expansive kitchen island, which features an incorporated quartzite-topped table supported by a steel base. A custom chandelier also hangs from the living room’s 22-foot ceiling.
The exterior is clad in large Hardie plank panels separated by custom powder-coated metal channels. All the exterior doors, including the oversized front door, are from Germany.
Coleman incorporated low-voltage lighting throughout the home, including under cabinets, in stair treads, and as part of the primary bathrooms’ shower shelves.