Builders Get Exercised Over Rooms for Fitness

You’re out of shape and you’re beginning to grow into those oversize clothes you bought to hide the extra pounds you put on last year.

You resolved to join a health club months ago, but you haven’t been able to find the time. Not only have you been working 12 hours a day but now you’re spending your spare time house hunting. So you’ve decided getting fit will just have to wait until you’re settled in your new home.

Then you walk through a model home in a new development that fits your budget, and you see it--a fully equipped fitness room in which you could work out at any hour of the day without having to expose your flab in public.

Perfect. You figure you could buy this house, put in an exercise room just like the one in the model and soon have a new body fit for the good life your new home represents.

You turn to the sales agent and ask: “Where do I sign?”

In real life, of course, buying a new home isn’t a typical way to acquire a new look. But the fitness boom has made an impression on Orange County home builders. As they become more tuned in to fitness-minded buyers, they increasingly are including exercise rooms in models to make tract homes more appealing.

No longer is the home gym a luxury reserved for million-dollar custom homes.

In a recent speech on trends for the ‘90s, interior designer Carole Eichen told the National Assn. of Home Builders: “Fitness is more than fashionable. It’s becoming a national obsession. . . . Home fitness equipment sales are soaring. People don’t want to go to a club and wait in line for a machine. So turn a secondary bedroom into a fitness center. Mirror a wall. . . .

“Thumbs up to the builder who genuinely cares about his buyer’s cardiovascular health. Thumbs down to the developer who ignores it or expects them to shell out $1,000 a year.”

Eichen, who is president of Carole Eichen Interiors Inc. in Santa Ana and specializes in model home interior design and merchandising, showed Mola Development Corp. of Newport Beach what she meant by designing an exercise room for a model at the firm’s Townsquare development in Huntington Beach.

One of the four bedrooms in a 2,000-square-foot townhouse starting at $410,900 is shown as an exercise room with a mirrored wall, a ballet bar, an exercise bike, a television set and an exercise pad on a hardwood floor. A hand-painted, life-size graphic on one wall provides a finishing touch that holds the power of suggestion: It shows a man with an admirably muscular physique doing calisthenics.

The townhouses don’t come with exercise equipment--or even a mirrored wall. These amenities are added to the model simply to suggest to buyers that ample space is available if they are interested in creating a fitness room on their own.

“We market our homes to show how people live or what they would wish for,” said Eichen, who recently converted her home office to a gym so she could exercise early in the morning. “We’ve been using more and more exercise rooms (in models) because more people are interested in physical fitness and living longer--and people want to exercise in the privacy of their home.”

She said 15% to 20% of the approximately 400 model homes she will design this year will have exercise rooms--usually in place of a second bedroom but occasionally in the master bath area if space allows.

In a particularly small home, she might even put an exercise bike instead of a chair in a living room corner “because that’s what people are doing in real life,” she said.

Dana Eggerts, president of Creative Design Consultants in Costa Mesa, said she’s seeing more fully equipped home gyms in tract houses today not only because people are health-conscious but also because they are having fewer children and therefore have room to spare.

Among her upcoming projects is the Yorba Highlands development of about 100 “mansion-type” tract homes to be built in Yorba Linda. Eggerts will design a 16-by-12-foot fitness room as part of an upstairs master bedroom suite in a 4,400-square-foot model.

Eggerts said the fitness room trend is filtering down from custom homes to luxury tract homes such as those in the Yorba Linda project to the more affordable tract housing market.

The Ross Co. decided to include a fitness room in the Yorba Highlands project because “our challenge is to try to deliver amenities you would normally get at the custom level,” said Ross Mollard, owner and president of the Newport Beach firm.

“We will try in that limited space to furnish as much opportunity for a home gym as you would have in a professional gym,” he said, noting that the room will be placed over the garage so that noise won’t be a problem if the buyer uses it as a gym.

There also will be an area for a juice bar and a hardwood floor that can be padded to accommodate heavy equipment, he said.

Yorba Highlands is the first development in which the Ross Co. is including an exercise room, Mollard said.

“We think the market is very much interested in this sort of thing,” he explained. “Our research shows that. Orange County people traditionally have been proud of their fitness.”

LDM Development Inc. in Laguna Hills is showing an exercise area in one of the models at Montelena, a new project near Laguna Niguel that includes 126 condos and townhouses selling for $155,000 to $230,000.

The model for a three-bedroom, 1,700-square-foot condo suggests buyers use part of an oversized laundry room as a home gym by placing a stationary bike and TV set next to the washer and dryer.

“We used to think of these areas as sewing or hobby rooms, but that’s definitely passe so we’re indicating that it’s an exercise-laundry area,” said Forest Dickason, a partner with LDM. “I think it appeals to the lifestyle of the potential buyers here.”

Bobbie Stearn, president of Bobbie Stearn Interior Design in El Toro, said fitness rooms are so much in demand that she includes them in more than half of the 40 model home projects her firm designs each year. She tries to use the most affordable exercise equipment in her models, which often include a punching bag and small trampoline as well as an exercise bike or stairstep machine.

She said exercise rooms are now de rigueur in the county’s custom homes and will become increasingly so in tract homes.

“It’s a very, very important part of people’s life styles,” she said. “Even people who belong to a gym want something handy in their own home for everyday maintenance.”