The Stunning Transformation Of HGTV Star Erin Napier

Of HGTV's numerous success stories, "Home Town" is perhaps the most unique. It's definitely the most specific, following home renovations set within the small town of Laurel, Mississippi, which boasted a population of less than 17,000 as of 2023 (via the U.S. Census Bureau). 

At the heart of the series are Erin Napier and her husband Ben, longtime Laurel residents who've made it their mission to revive and revitalize their tiny community, one home renovation at a time. While projects the couple undertakes are certainly front and center in each episode, its Erin and Ben who really bring viewers back week after week. "Somehow, against the odds, 'Home Town' is one of those long-running shows that has been on through different seasons of a life, and that is so rare," Erin said of the show's long-running popularity during an interview for HGTV. "There may be some kid who was in sixth grade when they watched our pilot episode and now they are a sophomore in college who watches it on trips home. Unbelievable."

Over the course of all those episodes — and various spin-offs and iterations of "Home Town" — fans haven't just watched the evolution of Laurel, they've also witnessed the many changes that Erin herself has undergone, from writing books to launching new products while embracing her unexpected stardom. Discover more by reading on to experience the stunning transformation of Erin Napier. 

While viewers of "Home Town" may see Erin Napier as brimming with confidence, that wasn't always the case. One of the many little-known facts about the HGTV star is that during middle school, young Erin Rasberry (her name prior to marriage) was targeted by bullies. "I was a bit strange and introverted," she said in an interview with Southern Living, as reported by People. As she explained, her interests at the time weren't exactly typical for kids of her age. "Library time was my favorite," she continued. "I had a fossil collection. I would put together natural history dioramas in old shoeboxes. Or I'd stay home and make a tiger costume — that was really exciting to me." 

It was her mother, Karen Rasberry, who helped Erin to accept her differences; rather than change to suit others, she was instead taught to embrace her uniqueness. As she recalled, her mother may have been head cheerleader in both high school and college, but she didn't hold similar expectations for her daughter. "But she never tried to push me into that mold," Erin added. "She told me to be exactly who I wanted to be and to never ever do anything just to fit in."

Like many, Erin Napier blossomed at college, coming into her own when she began attending Mississippi's Jones County Junior College in 2004. What "Home Town" fans don't know about Erin and Ben Napier is that college was where they first met. Ben would go on to become Erin's partner in life — and, eventually, television. "We had our first date in the student union. Everyone on both sides of our family went to school here," she said during an episode of "Home Town" (via People). 

Speaking with People in 2020, Erin recalled how popular Ben was on campus. "He was like a celebrity crush to me," she said. "He was the president of every club..." As it happened, Ben had taken notice of Erin as well. "She was walking across the student union, and she had a pixie haircut. I didn't know what a pixie cut was at the time, but I knew I liked it," he remembered.

Their first meeting, running into each other in a McDonald's, did not go well. "I was so nervous talking to him I crashed and burned," she said. In fact, they wound up having a few more awkward encounters like that, until Erin interviewed Ben for their school yearbook. It was during that conversation that both realized they'd found their soulmate. "Six days later we decided we would get married, and that was that," she said.

Just a few years after getting together, in 2007 Ben Napier proposed, surprising Erin Napier with a diamond ring and leather-bound book he'd handcrafted himself. The following year, the two got married on November 22, 2008. 

In a 2014 interview with Southern Weddings, Erin gushed about how organic it felt to be married; citing the oft-said expression that marriage takes work, she admitted that had not been their experience. "I've been surprised by how easy marriage is for us," she said. "I get that it's not so simple for everyone, and a lot of people have disagreements on important things like kids and finances, but we haven't struggled with that. Marriage is our comfort zone and support system; it's as natural as breathing and just as necessary for making my way through life with all its good and hard times."

In celebration of their 15th wedding anniversary in 2023, she posted some throwback photo from the ceremony on Instagram, marveling at how they were brought together by fate. "I sometimes think of all the people in the world, and how the earth is just this tiny dusty speck in the universe," she wrote in the caption. "And somehow, we managed to find each other." Ben also makes Erin a sweet gift every year to commemorate the highlights of their time together. 

While it may seem unbelievable that they'd consider living anywhere else, Erin and Ben Napier initially hadn't planned to settle in Laurel. "When we finished college we weren't planning to come back here," Ben revealed in an interview with People. "We had talked about living in Memphis or Birmingham, maybe going to Nashville. We even discussed how magical it would be to go to New York City and live and work for a little while." However, those dreams eventually gave way to reality as their love deepened, and they each felt the draw of Laurel pulling them home. "But then, as we were getting closer to graduation, and we knew we were getting married and starting our lives, it just felt right," he added.

For Erin, returning to Laurel and putting their energies into revitalizing it was also somewhat subversive. "The more rebellious thing is going home," she said, comparing the notion of moving somewhere different to that of returning home. "When you're young, you think the world is so much better if you could just get away from home — that the grass is always greener — but it's just not," she added, pointing out that anywhere one goes, there are bound to be problems needed solutions. "You can either complain about them and leave," she mused, "or you can stay and do something about it."

Newlyweds Erin Napier and husband Ben initially rented a loft in downtown Laurel. Ever since she was young, though, Erin had her eye on a 1925 Craftsman cottage that she'd longingly look at while taking walks through their town. "As a budding artist in my high school years, I would come downtown to draw the beautiful architecture, and I would daydream about making that unassuming yellow cottage my home one day," she recalled in an interview with Hooked on Houses.

Three years into their marriage, the couple met the woman who owned that particular home. During their conversation, Erin offhandedly remarked that they'd be interested in purchasing the place if she'd ever considered selling it. Within a month, they were the owners of their dream home. "Living in Mississippi affords you many great things — one of which is the crazy low cost of real estate!" she told Southern Weddings.

Naturally, there were a lot of renovations to undertake. As she explained, the thrifty pair stuck to a strict budget when renovating and furnishing the place. "We like shopping flea markets and architectural salvage, or Ben builds things himself," she said, admitting they did splurge on a few items, including a high-quality mattress and linen bedding from Restoration Hardware. "Other than that," she added, "if it's in our house, we probably found it on the side of the road."

It may be hard for their fans to imagine what Erin Napier and husband Ben did before becoming HGTV stars, but they actually collaborated on a successful venture that had nothing to do with home renovation. Together, they ran Lucky Luxe Couture Correspondence, which provided customized letterpress printing for wedding invitations and the like. Erin's knack for designing wedding invitations brought the couple a certain degree of attention long before they made it to television. "It's more than a piece of paper," Erin said of her invitations, via Rasberry Greene, "it's the first page of this new family's history."

As Erin explained, the business grew out of what had been a hobby, designing invitations for friends and family members. She decided to place her work on a blog, which wound up capturing the attention of a New York-based photographer. When the photographer asked Erin to make some hankies for her, she then posted them on her own blog — which led to a deluge of orders. Suddenly, what had been a side hustle while she worked a full-time job began taking off. "Before long, Lucky Luxe was taking up more of my time than my day job was and I left the cubicle to commit full-time to Lucky Luxe," Erin marveled.

The 2014 Southern Weddings article about how Erin and Ben Napier renovated and decorated their Craftsman home in Laurel, Mississippi, garnered a lot of attention. Among those who saw it was Lindsey Weldhorn, who was in charge of original programming for HGTV. She began following Erin on Instagram and loved what they'd been doing in Laurel. In 2015, she contacted the couple and pitched them on the idea of starring in a series for the network. 

Weldhorn put them in touch with a Canadian production company, RTR Media, which led to the creation of a "sizzle reel" of what a potential TV show could like. Weldhorn loved it, and told the Napiers that HGTV wanted to move forward. "They were ordering a pilot to begin filming in the spring! And we were stunned," Erin wrote in a blog post. "We had fallen in the pudding and had no idea how it happened."

That pilot proved to be good enough that HGTV decided to air it and then gauge how viewers responded. "We didn't think it would be possible," Erin told House Beautiful of making a television pilot for HGTV. "Why would it be possible to make a TV show in a town like Laurel, Mississippi? We love it very much, but that doesn't mean everyone else would." 

Despite Erin Napier's disbelief that HGTV viewers would have any interest in Laurel, Mississippi, viewership exploded when the pilot episode of "Home Town" aired in early 2016. "We made the pilot and assumed it probably won't be on TV, it was just for fun. And then it was on TV, and it was 2.2 million people [who] watched it," Erin explained during an appearance on CBS News pointing out that some bad weather in part of the country may have caused ratings to spike. "There was a snowstorm on the East Coast that day!" she added.

Based on all those viewers, HGTV ordered more episodes of "Home Town." The series' success continued, with ratings continuing to grow with each successive season. In 2021, HGTV announced plans to expand "Home Town" into a franchise encompassing several series, beginning with a 2022 spin-off called "Home Town Takeover," and then another, "Home Town Kickstart."

Looking back, Erin admitted she was amazed that everything wound up working out the way that it had. "I don't think you can ever anticipate something like this," she told House Beautiful. "It is such a happy surprise."

Now that Erin Napier and husband Ben had become bona fide HGTV stars, television viewers throughout the world were falling in love with Laurel. As a result, the couple took the next step in their ongoing quest to revitalize their beloved home town. Those plans, in fact, had pre-dated "Home Town," but were accelerated thanks to the show's success. As Erin told Southern Living, she, Ben and their friends had been saddened by the way that downtown Laurel had disintegrated, and became consumed with bringing it back from the brink. "How can we make downtown Laurel feel alive again?" was the question they'd asked themselves.

Those plans ultimately led to Laurel Mercantile, their own shop in downtown Laurel. "Durable goods and heirloom wares for home and life," Erin wrote in an Instagram post ahead of the grand opening. In December 2016, Laurel Mercantile officially opened its doors. "You can feel the love and the care that goes into making every product that's in our store, and also choosing it and curating it," Erin explained in an interview with Atlanta magazine. "It's not fluff; it's not filler. It's really good, heirloom-quality things."

HGTV viewers who watched Erin Napier on "Home Town" would have had no idea that she'd been battling severe health issues, a mysterious malady that had plagued her for a solid decade. "It was a really sad and scary and confusing 10 years," she told People in 2018 of the strange illness she'd been dealing with.

She first began experiencing symptoms at age 19. "In the beginning, it would be 24 hours of terrible stomach pain and a low-grade fever, and then it would disappear," she recalled, noting that her symptoms came to be more frequent and longer lasting, sometimes laying her out for a full week due to pain so intense it kept her bedridden — only to vanish. The condition left doctors stumped. "We went through everything, from doctors thinking it might be something really bad like cancer to saying it was in Erin's head," her husband, Ben Napier, added. 

Finally, she underwent exploratory surgery that revealed her internal organs were bound together by tissue. The surgeon who performed the operation was baffled, but another doctor was finally able to come up with a diagnosis: a perforated appendix, which had continually ruptured and then healed, over and over again, resulting in scar tissue that surrounded her organs. Finally, her appendix was removed, and her symptoms vanished. 

While the removal of Erin Napier's appendix cured the mystery ailment she'd been suffering with since the age of 19, the scar tissue that had formed left lasting damage. Doctors told her that it was unlikely that she would ever have a child. "I was very sad," she told People.

That sadness turned to elation when she and husband Ben conceived in 2017, welcoming their first child — a daughter they named Helen — in January 2018. "Helen is a joy in every way. She's kind of the best. She's the best baby ever," Erin gushed to People. 

Erin then went on to have a second pregnancy, announcing the news in 2021. In May of that year, they revealed the arrival of a second daughter, Mae. "While we are excited to have another daughter to love, we are more excited to see the bond she and Helen will have. They're already so in love with each other!" the couple said in a joint statement to People. 

The success that Erin Napier and her husband Ben had experienced from "Home Town" allowed them to indulge in a luxury they couldn't have anticipated earlier in their lives: purchasing a vacation home, which they then renovated with their signature design magic. Situated just outside of Laurel, in the Mississippi countryside, Ben discovered the listing in 2021. As soon as Erin saw the photos of the Tudor-style home, she was captivated. "I was in love immediately — and that scared me to death," she told Southern Living. "I thought, 'We don't need another house... but maybe we do.'"

The couple shared the process of renovating the home with HGTV viewers, with a 2021 episode of "Home Town" chronicling the project. "We are doing a house for ourselves! That is something very different," she told People of that special episode. "It's sort of a hideaway for us, a place out near family land where we can go and let the girls run on the weekends," Ben added.

In 2022, Erin Napier ventured into another area of showbiz when she and husband Ben made their debuts as actors when they starred in HGTV's first-ever scripted holiday movie, "A Christmas Open House." Their characters weren't all that far removed from their actual selves — they played supporting roles as small-town couple Henry and Sarah Wright, who renovate houses — in HGTV's attempt to replicate the success of Hallmark Channel's hit holiday movies. "Not something I ever would have put on my bingo card of life," Erin told Fox News of acting onscreen for the first time — in a movie filmed in Laurel, Mississippi, no less.

While the opportunity to star in a movie may seem like a no-brainer, Erin and Ben were initially hesitant. What changed their mind was a conversation with "Pioneer Woman" star Ree Drummond, who had recently made her own acting debut in a similar holiday movie for Food Network. "She said it was the most fun she's ever had and to definitely, definitely do it," Erin told People. "And I trust her. So we did!"