Before Phil Parsons built anything for a client, he built his own house with his own hands. In 1998, he and his family designed and built roughly 3,500 square feet of home themselves, driving in nearly every board and screw as a team. His older son Philip, now the head of sales at KP Homescapes, worked at his side through that year-long build.
Standing back and looking at what they’d built together did something to all of them. Phil calls it a fever. That feeling, the quiet end-of-day look at what we did, became the thing he spent the next decade chasing.
For 15+ years before that, Phil worked with the U.S. Navy’s Naval Air Systems Command, developing electronic warfare and infrared countermeasure systems for naval aircraft. The work was technical and mattered, but Phil wanted two things the Navy could not give him: A business of his own and something tangible he could point to and say he built.
So the family sold their house and used the money to start the business. Phil had no mentor and no safety net. His first real break came from the pastor of a local church, who hired him to take a hundred-year-old home down to the studs and rebuild it for the pastor’s daughter. Phil got complete freedom on that project. Four months later, it looked brand new. That single job taught him the trade from the ground up and gave him the trade relationships every new contractor needs and almost never has when starting out.
COVID made the next decision for him. In a single day, three renovation jobs were canceled because homeowners did not want crews inside their homes. Phil moved every employee onto deck crews and immediately started advertising outdoor living work. That shift happened in 2020 and 2021, and it became KP Homescapes.
Today, KP Homescapes builds outdoor living spaces across Charles, Prince George’s, Calvert, and St. Mary’s counties, all built on one idea Phil repeats often: Listen first. KP does not build to the dimensions a homeowner first requests. The team starts by asking how the space will get used day to day, then designs toward that answer, even when the finished project looks nothing like what the homeowner originally pictured.
Phil also pushed the industry on a technical point most builders accept without question. Local convention attaches a second support beam close to the house, which leaves the space underneath the deck mostly unusable. Phil worked with an engineer and with Prince George’s and Charles counties to get a ledger-attachment approach approved, one that reclaims that space on houses where feasible. Many competitors still believe the approach is against the code. It is not, and KP has the county approval to prove it.
