Ben and Erin Napier’s ideal Florida vacation doesn’t involve a certain mouse, but it still holds plenty of magic.
For the third season of their spinoff series Home Town Takeover, in which the HGTV stars help revitalize a down-on-its-luck small town, they head to Sebring, Fla., a turn-of-the-century resort destination in need of a major boost.
The married designer and carpenter felt an immediate connection to the setting for the season.
“When you live in Mississippi, you grow up going on vacation to Florida, that’s the beach,” explains Erin. But Sebring, a central Florida city of 11,000 that’s home to a historic citrus industry and has ties to NASCAR, is a bit different. “It’s not theme parks and it’s not the beach. It’s something else,” but it’s just as special.
While the smell of orange blossoms lured Erin, it was the aroma of burning rubber that sparked Ben’s interest. “I read about the racetrack and that a lot of teams train there,” he says. “I know some NASCAR guys, so I called one of them and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, we go there for road training.’ I said, ‘Can you tell me anything about the town?’ And he said, ‘I don’t think there’s a town there.'”
The drivers aren’t the only ones who unintentionally passed over Sebring itself. The Napiers refer to the region as “the forgotten Florida.” “It’s the vacation land that Erin and I like to visit because it’s old vacation. It’s the kind of vacation that our grandparents went on,” says Ben.
Sebring’s residents were already pushing to put their town back on the map when the Napiers pulled up in 2024.
“You could tell there are people who really love it and they care about it, and parts of it are doing well,” Erin explains. “But the downtown, specifically, was fifty or sixty percent shuttered,”
Adds Ben, “The things that were open, were awesome and great. And then the things that were not open had not been open in a long time.”
Through the season’s six episodes, which kicked off March 9, Ben and Erin will help business owners refresh their storefronts, make over the homes of residents who are pillars in the community, and rehab public spaces to serve both the people who live there and the visitors they’re hoping to attract.
The Napiers and their daughters, Helen, 7, and Mae, 4, got to sample the sweet life during filming.
“Our girls, the whole time we were working, they were having adventures and going to these great fruit farms where you could get orange-flavored everything: oranges, orange ice cream, orange juice, orange candy, they got all of it,” says Erin. “But it’s just so different from [our hometown,] Laurel [Miss.] and so different” from the locations of Home Town Takeover seasons 1 and 2 in Fort Morgan, Colo. and Wetumpka, Ala.
Ben and Erin decided during season 1 that the only way to make a show that required them to be away from home for weeks at a time would work for their family, is if they brought their girls along for the journey.
In Sebring, “we rented a house on the lake and every day when we would come home, we would either all go sit on the pier or wade out into the water,” says Erin. “The girls would play in the sand and they felt like we were on vacation. They didn’t know any different.”
The concept of Takeover was born out of the transformation the Napiers achieved in their own small town, where they’ve been restoring houses over 8 seasons of their hit series Home Town, and opening several businesses that have drawn visitors from across the country.
“It feels like if there is anything valuable we can offer, then we definitely should,” says Erin of spreading the good word about (and hard work that comes with) reinvigorating small town America. “We know what doesn’t work, for sure. We’ve learned that. I think a lot of towns might have the hope that they can just mimic what a different town that they like does, and that it will turn out the same way for them. But that’s not the case. And that’s an important lesson that we know how to apply: you got to be the town that you are.”
The biggest takeaway, says Ben, “from us doing this for all these years, is that Laurel can’t be Wetumpka. Sebring can’t be Fort Morgan.”
Adds Erin, “Everybody has to find their own flavor and then really sell it to the people that live there, to the people you already have.”
New episodes of Home Town Takeover air Sundays at 8/7C on HGTV.
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