Meet Eric & Ali

Eric Johnston

The neighbor you’ll work with

A little background, so you know the perspective behind the advice.

Eric is the one you’ll meet, talk with and work with, from the first conversation to the closing table. He’s also your neighbor. Eric and Ali live in Gran Paradiso, and there’s no place they’d rather call home.

He opened Gran Paradiso for sales for the builder/developer and ran onsite sales here for over a decade. In that time he worked with thousands of Gran Paradiso buyers and helped more than 400 people buy and build in the neighborhood. He watched every street go in, and today he rides those same streets as a resident.

“I wanted my neighbors to be able to take advantage of the knowledge and experience I have and truly be able to help them.”

— Eric

Eric has spent more than 25 years in Sarasota County new homes and development, including more than 12 in Wellen Park. National and international home builders hired him, and he was a top producer for each of them, with division-level and national recognition along the way.

When Ali owned West Villages Realty, Eric ran all of its marketing and built its websites, so he knows exactly how a home shows up online and how buyers find it.

Florida roots

Eric is that rare thing here, a true Southwest Florida native, and the Gulf Coast has been home for more than 55 years. He grew up in Naples and has lived in Sarasota County for more than 30 years. His family’s Florida story goes back even further.

Before Eric was born, his mom lived in Central Florida, where his grandfather owned a high-end furniture store that carried names like Henredon. As a late teen, she worked at Cypress Gardens as a Southern Belle, posing for pictures with visitors, and she water-skied in the ski show too.

Eric grew up in Naples surrounded by everything there is to love about Florida, and the family album shows it. Naples was a quaint beach town back then, a lot like Venice. In 1972, Walt Disney World’s first year, his mom and dad took him to the Magic Kingdom. Around 1979, that same grandfather flew into the Venice airport for the day, and young Eric stood on the wing of the plane before the two of them walked across the street to Caspersen Beach. As a teenager in Naples, he spent camping weekends in the Ten Thousand Islands.

Home mattered just as much. Fine furniture and interior design ran deep on both his mother’s and his father’s sides, and his father later became head of sales for a highly respected custom builder of fine homes on Hilton Head Island. His stepmother, Donna, ran a highly respected interior design firm on the island, with a top-shelf reputation and clients’ homes not only on Hilton Head but all over the country. They made their home in Sea Pines, the Hilton Head community Charles Fraser founded in 1956, widely seen as a blueprint for the modern, environmentally conscious master-planned community, and home of the RBC Heritage golf tournament. Eric and Ali love spending time in Sea Pines whenever they can. By example, his mom and dad taught him a lesson he still lives by:

“The decision of where we choose to live dictates so much of the quality of the life we live.”

— Eric

As a kid in the ’80s, Eric watched Naples boom, and it shaped how he sees growth to this day. He loves Florida’s natural side as much as anything, and he puts it this way:

“The beauty of this place is what attracts the people who invest to improve our way of life and offer it to others. Yet Florida’s natural beauty and resources must never be taken for granted. More often than not, it’s the locals on the ground who best recognize the impacts and losses, and who know what must be cherished and protected.”

— Eric

Eric went into development himself and has been part of the region’s growth his whole life. It’s why he cares so much about where people live and how their homes feel, and it’s a perspective that counts in a business whose most important principle is that it’s local. “I’m not shooting from the hip or delivering a canned pitch,” he says. He believes Venice and Sarasota County are destined to be the hottest place to live on this coast, if they aren’t already.

Part of that belief comes from something he sees as unique to Sarasota County: its artistic nature, and how much the people here appreciate it. He thinks it’s really important to the area’s future. “That’s the component that harvests inspiration,” he says.

What’s inside the home

Inspiration belongs at home, too. Where a home sits is only half of it. The other half is how it feels inside, and that’s why Eric co-founded Trim My Crib, a design-build interior detail company in Venice known for media walls, accent walls and wood ceilings, with his friend Jamie, whom he met when Jamie bought a home from the builder Eric worked for. Eric believes good design adds to our well-being, emotionally and psychologically, and to our creativity.

The idea took shape over years of sitting in model homes, watching buyers fall for the design features they saw. Whether they could get them depended on the builder. A design center might offer them, top notch but extremely rare and top dollar. Sometimes the same crew that framed the interior walls would build the wall unit, usually at a premium. Most often, it simply wasn’t offered.

That left a handyman or the rare quality trim carpenter. A good handyman is a tremendous value, but design details are a craft of their own, and trim is something you live with for years. A great trim carpenter was a real find, though rarely one with an easy way to communicate, through no fault of their own.

People didn’t want a designer. They knew what they wanted, or had an idea, and they needed someone to make it easy, bring it all together and deliver high-quality work with a professional team and a process they could trust. Hence, Trim My Crib was born.

Here’s something people don’t always expect: Eric is a total geek. Technology has been his first passion for as long as he can remember, and it still is. He built the websites for Gran Paradiso and Trim My Crib himself, and when Ali owned West Villages Realty, he built the sites that brought her agents their leads. Everyone has a talent. Some people work on cars, some paint, some fish. “This is where I find my inspiration and creativity,” he says.

Today the family is rooted here: Eric’s son, Devin, lives locally too. And Eric still looks at a home the way he was raised to: where it is, and how it feels to live there.

When he isn’t working, you’ll probably spot him on his bike. He’s an avid cyclist.

Eric is a licensed Florida real estate broker with Hoover Realty LLC.

Eric Johnston, Hoover Realty LLC