Buyers who want to customize the look of their new homes can select everything from grout to garage doors at builder showrooms.
Home buyer Perri Hiles, her mother and an interior designer huddled in the kitchen of a new-home showroom, intently studying a 2 1/2-inch stick of grayish grout as it lay next to a peach-hued square of ceramic floor tile.
“I like anything darker, to cover the dirt,” Hiles said.
“It looks very rustic,” said Lorna Hoffman, Hiles’ mother. “Do you want rustic?”
Choices, choices. A house full of choices.
Increasingly, home builders say, buyers insist on having it their way when it comes to the look and feel of their new homes.
In response to the demand, and in hopes of generating extra profit by selling the upgrades, a number of Southern California home builders have set up showrooms where consumers can select everything from grout to garage doors.
The showrooms--also called design centers or design studios--feature thousands of ways that buyers can “customize” their homes, including adding security systems, ordering special landscaping, selecting window coverings or even an exterior stone facade, in addition to such usual choices as flooring.
And whether the center is set up like a series of well-appointed rooms or like a no-frills product showroom, the facilities usually have places for children to play or watch videos while parents are busy and refrigerators stocked with drinks and snacks for visitors.
During their appointment at Richmond American Homes’ HomeShaper Gallery in Yorba Linda, Hiles and Hoffman were seated at a kitchen island with the interior designer, Laurie Smith.
The 6,500-square-foot showroom is arranged in a series of kitchen and living room “vignettes” that are decorated to correspond with the price ranges of the homes the company sells: entry-level, move-up and luxury.
Hiles’ new five-bedroom home in Chino Hills is partly built, so all she had to decide on during her three-hour visit was tile and carpet. Everything else--the plentiful options for counter tops and cabinetry, appliances and stair railings--was already set by the time she bought her $267,000 home.
But as designer Laurie Smith proffered a tray of dozens of grout samples ranging from snow-white to brick-red, and as Smith later led Hiles and her mother into a room containing 400 carpet samples, even making a few decisions was far from easy.
For her household with foot traffic from two teenagers, two cats, a dog and plenty of visiting friends and relatives, Hiles, 40, decided she wanted upgraded tile wherever she could afford it.
Hiles, the manager at an oral surgery practice, had anticipated spending only about $5,000 on upgrades. But after an hour and a half, she was considering spending about $8,000 on carpet and tile, even after deciding to carpet the living and family rooms to save money.
Home builders report that buyers tend to add 10% to 20% to the price of their homes in upgrades. However, “if they really want to deck the home out, they’re going to spend between 20% and 30% of their purchase price to really get their dream home,” said Sheryl Chapman, design center director for California Pacific Homes, whose showroom is in Newport Beach.
Avoid Extra Expense by Choosing Standards
Buyers can avoid the extra expense of upgrades by choosing standard options. But once presented with the range of possibilities on display in the showrooms, few buyers choose the plain-Jane route.
Staff members at the California Pacific facility, who do not work on commission, try to help people stay within their budgets, Chapman said. Otherwise, customers may later resent the builder and feel that they were sold extras they didn’t need.
Other builders agreed.
“We don’t like [buyers] to leave here with a big pit in their stomachs,” said Linda Lowe of Brookfield Homes.
Designers strive to create the kind of decor seen in model homes while keeping buyers’ budget limitations firmly in mind, said Lowe.
Brookfield’s studios, one in Costa Mesa and one in Calabasas, offer such extras as drapes, furniture, pillows and picture frames along with such traditional upgrades as flooring.
Most buyers wrap the cost of their upgrades into their home loans, although some decide to pay for them separately.
Builders say they have an incentive to make sure buyers don’t overspend at the showroom:
If buyers choose upgrades that are beyond their means, they may not get approved for the larger home loan they need. And such a buyer, discouraged, may walk away from the builder altogether.
Many buyers think that selecting upgrades from builders’ design centers is more costly than buying from a large home center warehouse. That’s often a misperception, said Mary Fitzgerald, manager of John Laing Homes’ design center, adding that her staff often shops at such outlets, posing as homeowners, to make sure Laing’s prices are competitive.
Showroom Trend Started in Early ‘90s
The trend toward design showrooms began in the early 1990s, but only in the last three or four years have so many of Southern California’s larger builders gotten into the act. Before the trend caught on, most builders contracted with independent vendors who would sell and install upgraded flooring, for example, at the buyers’ request.
“You used to walk into models 10 years ago and there’d be signs: ‘We permit no changes,’ ” said Steve Cauffman, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Richmond American. But these days, with society as a whole demanding more options and service, “you have to accommodate people.”
Among the builders who sell their own upgrades in design centers are Richmond American, Kaufman & Broad, Fieldstone Communities, Brookfield Homes, John Laing, S&S; Homes, California Pacific, Taylor Woodrow and Shea Homes.
Most Southern California builders that have integrated the home-design upgrades into their own businesses have set up large, centrally located showrooms.
For example, customers who buy any home from Kaufman & Broad in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties go to the builder’s 14,000-square-foot design facility in Santa Ana.
But not all builders do it this way. Taylor Woodrow Homes, which builds homes priced in the $500,000-to-$2-million range, displays all its upgrades inside a three- or four-car garage on the site of each of its new-home communities.
This way, both the interior designers who sold the upgrades and construction site managers can check on the progress of the home often, said Joan Marcus-Colvin, vice president of design center operations for Taylor Woodrow.
And although builders insist that customer demand has driven the design showroom trend, it’s clear that the facilities are profit centers as well.
“The trend in the last few years has been going in-house, because of the profit opportunities,” Marcus-Colvin said, adding that the company actually had one buyer in Newport Coast who added $1 million in upgrades to a $1.4-million house. “Customization is so important to our buyer today that we can’t turn back.”
Of course, design center fervor has not made converts of all builders. Smaller builders can’t afford fancy design studios, and even some of the larger builders are not sure the rewards are worth the expense.
Greystone Homes, a subsidiary of Lennar Homes, has moved to a system it calls “everything’s included.” Buyers have a limited range of options to choose from for counters, cabinets and electrical packages, for example, and the choices are all included in the price of the home.
Denis Cullumber, president of Greystone’s South Coast Division, likened it to the approach used by auto makers in offering a DX model with one package of options and an LX with more options, for example.
Greystone used to have a design showroom, Cullumber said, but shifted about 18 months ago to the “everything included” approach in hopes of making home buying simpler for buyer and builder alike.
“It became a complex little business to run for not a whole lot of money coming back,” he said.
Builders who use the design center approach say they like it because it allows them greater control of the production.
“Instead of having all the individual subs [subcontractors] trying to do all these custom options . . . it turns out it was much easier to set up a one-stop shop,” said Christine Diemer Iger, chief executive of the Orange County chapter of the Building Industry Assn.
Offering customers a greater level of design choices is, she said, “a survival course for anybody in the business of selling housing.” Managers at home design centers in Southern California say buyers usually visit the centers at least twice and sometimes more than a dozen times, depending on how many options and upgrades they want and on how indecisive they are about choosing features.
Challenge of Picking From So Many Products
Selecting from among thousands of products can be trying for both buyer and showroom employees.
“Have I ever had anybody freak out? Someday when I retire I’m going to write a book,” said California Pacific’s Chapman. “I have someone freak out about once a week.”
Sometimes designers try to warn buyers against unwise choices--like insisting on having counter tops made of a material that “scratches even before you get it out of the box,” Chapman said.
But, in the end, what the customer says goes. If, for example, a client wants a whole house full of pink carpet, “we install pink carpet,” said Fitzgerald of John Laing Homes.
“But basically [we] remind people that you . . . might want to think about the resale impact.”
Staff at the design centers are also responsible for reminding customers about cutoffs, the myriad dates by which upgrade selections must be finalized. After the cutoff, there’s no changing your mind, designers warn buyers.
Although confronted by about 5,000 carpet samples, dozens of shutters and blinds and a virtual wall of tile when they entered Kaufman & Broad’s design showroom recently, Dan and Jennifer Baptie spent only two hours selecting the flooring and shutters for their new home in Corona.
The Bapties, who are moving from Toronto with their two young daughters, paid about $259,000 for their house. Their first choices for upgrades would have added $16,000 to the cost, but they had planned to spend only $13,000 in extras. By selecting less expensive carpeting, they brought the costs within their budget.
Dan Baptie, who works for a relocation company, said he helps families make decisions about moving and homes every day. “But when we do it ourselves, it’s so stressful,” he said, trying to entertain 1 1/2-year-old Meghan, who’d grown tired of the showroom’s kids’ corner.
Meanwhile, Donna Johnson, whose family of five moved into their new home in Hemet in December, was on her second visit to the showroom. In about an hour, she chose kitchen flooring, forest-green carpet and an upgraded refrigerator for her 2,800-square-foot home, adding more than $5,500 to the purchase price of just under $160,000. Still to come: backyard landscaping.
Elsewhere in the showroom, Amita Goel made her third visit to select options for her $515,000 Irvine home, which she estimated would cost about $540,000 with upgrades.
She had already decided on a stairway banister, counter tops and cherry-stained cabinets for her home, but she was still pondering flooring options.
“It’s a hard choice, because it’s going to be laid down there a long time,” Goel said, studying the samples she’d placed on the floor. “I wish magic would happen and I was all set.”