Chaden Halfhill’s blue eyes dance when he envisions the day when the space housing Silent Rivers Inc. is an archetype of the creativity his design-build company offers its clients. Its current office, a cobbled together doublewide mobile home tucked at the west end of a gravel trail at 3100 86th St. in Urbandale, hardly does that.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the symbolism in his decision to lease a building in an overgrown area that the late Roberta Whitson fought a series of court battles in the 1990s to preserve as-is in a family trust. The area – part artists’ enclave, part business incubator – fronts one of Urbandale’s fastest-growing business districts, but stretches the limits, as Halfhill’s designs do, of city zoning codes.

“Nothing I do is without significance,” he said, apologizing as quickly as the words are uttered for any vanity anyone overhearing the comment might have been inferred.

His modesty notwithstanding, it’s true. Consider the name of his company, which turns 10 this year and employs 11 designers and artisans. “Silent” is metaphoric of the creative process, Halfhill said, while “Rivers” plays off a comment made about a decade ago by a fellow art student at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

“A friend said I had a river running through me. I actually believe everyone does. In my case, as a sculptor and artist, I have a passion for creativity, but it may be a passion for writing for someone else, or a talent for numbers.

“I value the voice of everybody in this company – the artisans in the field making decisions and the designers, who are the project manager,” Halfhill said. “They’re like tributaries to the river. They all have an eye, either trained or they just have a tendency in that area. The creativity is that river, and it’s plural [in the remodeling company’s name] because it’s those people who bring creativity to the process.”

Like his company, Halfhill is something of an anomaly at a time when Iowa leaders are lamenting how many creative young people are dashing after their dreams in large metropolitan areas outside the state’s borders. Discouraged after his graduation from Wesleyan in 1990 with the opportunities to make a living sculpting on the East Coast, Halfhill came home to Des Moines to find work.

“Rather than going out and looking for creativity – I could have gone to Minneapolis or New York City – why not apply that creativity here?” he said. “Why not try to find my own passions, instead of looking outward for solutions? Mind you, that’s not an easy thing when you go against the grain of what’s traditional or common.”

He wasn’t immediately gratified. His first job was a circulation manager at The Des Moines Register, the same paper he had carried as a kid to build his college fund. Halfhill’s face is telling as he relates the experience, which lasted only about six months. His creativity wasn’t challenged, and the daily drudgery of reporting to work around 4 a.m. neither meshed with his twentysomething lifestyle nor nurtured his artist’s soul. He knocked around Des Moines, doing feel-good work for the Iowa Arts Council and Homes of Oakridge. Halfhill and some other artists started an alternative art gallery in the Sherman Hill neighborhood, but his partners were more interested in the bohemian lifestyle than in approaching the venture seriously, Halfhill said.

“I learned that if you’re not clear in your expectations,” he said, “things can go awry.”

Halfhill got into the design-build business almost by accident. “People kept asking if I could fix things,” he said. “I was doing odd, pick-me-up construction jobs, and that’s how I decided on construction.”

Silent Rivers’ motto is “The Art of Building; The Building of Art.”    “It may not hang in a gallery,” he said, “but I consider what we do an art form.”

Silent Rivers differs from other remodeling companies that operate under the lead carpenter system. “That carpenter is responsible for the carpentry, but also the professional management of the project,” Halfhill explained. “Here, it’s a lead artisan system – not just being a carpenter, but being an artisan who embraces the craft and the technique of putting something together in a very caring, thoughtful, attentive way: looking at joinery and lines, thinking about the surface of the material, caring about the job, and making sure that it’s done well, that the service is carried through.”

Halfhill seeks workers who share his artistic values. Calling them artisans instead of craftsmen, drywallers or painters, he compares them to “graphic designers who tweak elements until the proportions are right.”

Designers collaborate with clients, then carry their vision through the construction process. “What presents a challenge is, a lot of people are intimidated by the creativity,” Halfhill said. “They want to know the cost right up front.”

Other clients, however, are comfortable allowing the project to reveal itself.

A recent example was an 1860s farm home south of Des Moines. The original project involved building a porch, but during the work, artisans uncovered the original structure of the building. It had been a one-room house with a pot-bellied stove, called a “balloon” house, one of many that sprang from the prairie. Discussions ensued about how much of the original structure to retain and how to blend the historic and contemporary features of the house.

“The homeowners appreciated the process of sitting and watching the face unfold,” he said.

They also were willing to pay for the resulting costs, Halfhill said.

The company began as a specialist in outdoor living spaces, such as winding fences, custom decks, outbuildings and other structures, but whole-house remodeling jobs have contributed to the company’s growth. Projects – about 40 of them a year – range in price from a $1,000 deck to a $500,000 house remodeling. Halfhill aspires to one day build custom homes, but for now is content with the niche his company has carved out, particularly in historic preservation. Halfhill said he’s particularly challenged when a project requires him to fuse historic and contemporary elements into a design.

“We still do a lot of interesting out-structures that are a transition between the house and the yard, and we’ve been trying in the last few years to continue to support that niche, but also clarify our ability to do everything from kitchen to whole-house remodeling,” he said. “We’re not trying to the biggest, and we’re not trying to be the cheapest. We’re trying to be a high-quality, attentive company.”