Home building is a family affair for Elk Rapids' Gribi brothers, Roger, Kevin and Brad, but they never suspected while growing up that they'd end up building custom homes for a living - much less doing it together. They pursued entirely different interests in school, and it took some happy twists of fate to reunite them in the company know as Gribi builders. Granted, it wasn't sheer chance. Carpentry is an honored tradition in the family, and Gribis have been craftsmen and farmers since before they emigrated from Switzerland to Michigan in the 1860s. Roger, Kevin and Brad's dad, Richard, was a carpenter, and their Uncle Ken built custom homes in the Lansing area for more than 30 years. The brothers just naturally began learning the trade from the time they were old enough to swing a hammer.

There were hints early on of their future company's motto "A Tradition of Excellence." All three graduated at the top of their respective classes from Elk Rapids High School. When Roger, the eldest, graduated from the University of Michigan School of Business in 1971, he went into marketing, with the hope of someday having a business of his own.

Those, of course, were the Vietnam days, and luck had dealt Roger a low number in the draft lottery. He didn't find many employers ready to risk hiring him. Even when he did find a marketing job, he found he wasn't overjoyed at working inside an office all day. So while he waited for the draft notice that never came, he did what came naturally and went to work as a carpenter for his uncle Ken in Lansing. For nearly a year, while Roger practiced the craft of building, his uncle Ken also taught him the business of building, job-planning, dealing with customers, subcontracting and coping with crisis.

More happy fate brought the three brothers' lives back together in 1975. That spring, back in Elk Rapids, Roger heard about a house addition being planned across the bay in Northport. He bid on, and landed, the job as a general contractor, and Gribi Builders was born. Good help, he soon discovered, was near at hand, in the person of his brother, Kevin. Kevin had graduated from the University of Michigan two years before, but after a stint in law school and a job as a legal researcher, he wanted something new. He decided to join Roger in his new endeavor.

No sooner was the first job completed than Brad came aboard. Brad had graduated that spring with a degree in biology from Central Michigan University. Intending to get a master's and become a teacher, he wanted to take a year away from academic life and consider his career plans. Working with his brothers seemed a good way to spend that year, so in November he joined the fledgling family business.

Nancy Gribi brought her interior design talents to the family company about eight years ago. She and Roger met when she was working as a interior designer for one of his customers. It wasn't long before she was doing work for other customers as Mrs. Gribi. She complements the family's skills by helping them choose carpet, tile, wallpaper and paint, and she schedules the subcontractors for installation. Many customers are downstaters building second homes in Northern Michigan, and Nancy keeps them well informed from afar of the progress on the job. Roger uses computer- aided- design (CAD) software for construction plans and and to help customers visualize how jobs will look when finished.

One of Gribi Builder's hallmarks is that customers become friends and neighbors as well. Nancy laughs that when she first met Roger, she wondered why his clients were so friendly. They're the friendliest people in the world, she remembered thinking. Eventually she figured it out: Roger and his brothers develop those friendships with the way they relate to customers during a job. The main reason they've chosen to stay small is that they don't want to lose the personal touch. Knowing that the brothers are actually on the job, doing the work and assuring the quality is a real benefit to the customers.

One of their jobs was for Jim McDivitt, the astronaut whose partner, Ed White, took the first space walk some 30 years ago. Jim and Judy McDivitt have a place near Elk Rapids, a rambling, old farmhouse that had been added to several times before they came. When they decided a few years ago to remodel it further and add a guest-house, the McDivitts chose the Gribis after talking to friends and neighbors.

"One of the brothers is our neighbor," Jim McDivitt explains, "and we had heard good things about them. Another of our neighbors knew them and recommended them.

"Roger did the design from our input ... we wanted several walls taken out to make a family room/dining room, and the paneling had to match the original. Our goal was to keep the basic feel authentic ... Roger was very helpful in directing us to different suppliers to look at fixtures and other building materials.

"The thing is that they were interested in what they were doing and they worked hard. It was extremely important to us to maintain the same aesthetic feel on our guest house project as the original structures. I could tell them what I wanted and he could do it, whatever it was. Everything they do is top quality."

Barb and Bernie Johnson, for whom the Gribis' built a new home on Torch Lake, agree. They had worked eight months with their architect and when they got down to picking a builder, they quickly narrowed the choices after speaking with several other people the Gribis had built for on Torch Lake. Says Bernie Johnson, "I was pretty comfortable he was the guy I wanted. I'm down here working in Troy and I obviously wanted assurance that I just didn't need to be there everyday." With the Gribis, he says, "you don't need to be there watching. If you know Roger, he tends to be on the shy side, so he wasn't overly trying to market himself. I appreciated his straight forward honesty. He is very thorough in his work. Our house has high quality everywhere, from laying the block, to the stonework, to the electrical, the painting and shingles ... especially the woodwork."

The Gribis enjoy working with one another. They work in harmony with themselves and the other professionals involved in the construction of a home. The Gribis do all the carpentry themselves, and they rely on a group of subcontractors they have hand-picked over the past 23 years.

Nancy Gribi, who handles much of the customer relations work for the family business, considers her husbands bids "very competitive in their type of construction," but agrees that it is often difficult to explain to some prospects that "you really do get what you pay for." Roger is fond of recalling that the first space shuttle pilot, when asked by a reporter if he was nervous just before take-off, said he was "about as comfortable as I can be, knowing that I'll be flying in a billion dollar piece of machinery that was built by the lowest bidder."

Attention to detail has helped Gribi Builders establish themselves as the premier builder of custom homes in the Elk Rapids area.