Big House, Bigger Furniture Budget

By Katherine Salant

What does Hillary Clinton with her 5,500-square-foot, six-bedroom house on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., have in common with buyers of the brand new 5,000-square-foot houses that are beginning to dot the suburbs around the country? Not enough furniture. Hillary's situation differs only in degree. She started with almost no furniture, but most people moving into houses this large do not have enough furniture to fill them up, observed Susan Orlie, an Arlington, Texas, interior designer who has worked with many people buying the brand new big houses.

"Twenty-five hundred to five thousand square feet is a big jump," Orlie said. "Nobody has 5,000-square-feet worth of furniture. And, unless you have $35,000 to buy some more things, your house will look half-empty." What's more, Orlie added, "you can't assume that all the furniture you have now will work in a bigger house - the style and size may be wrong. In your new and bigger family room, your sofa may look too small and squatty."

How inappropriate the furniture is often depends on what point in your life you purchased it, said Herndon, Va., interior designer Susan Gulick, who has also worked with clients buying the big new houses. If most of your furniture dates back to your early married days 25 years ago, when your house was tiny and your tastes were modest and ran to Danish modern, it will look out of place in a bigger, grander house with bigger rooms.

Most buyers of the big houses do realize that they will need more furniture, the designers said. The problem is that they never budget enough. "People never realize how much it will cost. If they haven't bought any furniture in the last 10 years, they may not realize that its cost has gone up, just like everything else," Gulick said. If, like Hillary, you have to start from scratch, Orlie estimated that the furniture for a 5,000 square foot house in the Dallas area where she works would be about $70,000. But in the Washington, D.C., market where Gulick works, that would be a bare bones budget for that size house. In her experience, to get the kind of finished look that the buyers of the big houses expect, $150,000 for the furniture is a more realistic figure.

Living with some empty rooms initially and buying furniture piecemeal as your pocketbook allows may not sound appealing, but it's not a bad strategy for recreating the Old Money Look of the Grand Old Houses that many of the buyers of the big new houses seek to emulate, said Englewood, Colo., interior designer Lita Dirks. In all the famous old houses in Boston's Lewisburg Square, Newport, R.I., and even Washington's Embassy Row, she pointed out, the furniture pieces are "an unmatched mix of styles that have been handed down from one generation to the next, not living room suites with matching end tables."

Furniture aside, though, Hillary does have an important advantage over the buyers of big houses that are brand new. She has a finished house and can put up with the taste of the previous owners until she gets around to changing the walls, floor finishes and the window treatments. For buyers of the new houses, furniture is only one item on a long list.

For example, when these buyers move in, the most pressing issue will not be the sofa size in the family room, or a living room with no sofa at all, it will be privacy, Orlie said. With next door neighbors likely to be a mere 30 to 40 feet away and the many large windows the new house is sure to have, the buyers will "feel like they're living in a fish bowl" without some window treatments. Orlie always recommends plantation shutters, which are hinged like a door on either side of the window opening. The shutters have adjustable louvers that can open or shut. Orlie favors them because they can dress up a room with scant furnishings, they're cheaper than draperies, and they look great from the outside. But installing the shutters for an entire 5,000 square-foot house can run $16,000 to $20,000, and some of her clients put the shutters on the front and installed less costly wood blinds on the sides and back of their house.

Soft window coverings or draperies may add more flair, but outfitting an entire 5,000-square-foot house with them is easily double the cost of the shutters, Gulick said, adding that most buyers are surprised by the cost of draperies, but they are a labor-intensive item.

There are many details that must be addressed before you move in and these can also eat up your furniture budget, Orlie said. "In many of the large rooms, table lamps will not be sufficient, and you'll need recessed ceiling fixtures. Then there's the painting you will someday inherit from your grandmother so you want to add a spotlight over the mantel and one over the buffet for another family heirloom that you will own someday.

"How much to spend on the lighting just depends on how much you want to spend on granite countertops and a host of other things. When you work out your dream plan for lighting and find that it's $36,000, you may halve it to get the other six things on your wish list. A lot of people just swallow and live with the standard lights put in by the builder." But Orlie advises buyers to weigh the lighting carefully and if possible to see several finished houses after dark because the lighting can make a huge difference in how a room looks and feels at night, and even during the day when the weather is cloudy.

Floor finishes are often another big ticket item in a big-house budget. Some flooring will be included in the price of the house, but buyers can add thousands by ratcheting up from less expensive broadloom carpet to hand-tufted ones for the main living areas or choosing wide-plank heartwood pine flooring instead of oak.

And then there's the exterior to deal with. Most buyers of big houses have grandiose ideas, but Dirks urges them to reign in their aesthetic impulses before cost is even addressed. "With such a broad canvas, it's easy to go overboard and incorporate every architectural style you have ever loved, but the result will be a mish-mash. I've seen houses with the English cottage look, some English Tudor, Queen Anne Victorian and, for good measure, Frank Lloyd Wright. The exterior materials can be an eclectic mix of stone, stucco, and wood siding, with a brick chimney, and a copper covered turret projecting from one corner. Each design feature by itself can be fabulous, but mixed together the result is awful. You can mix styles successfully but you need to start out with one overarching theme and give the other ones a minor, supporting role."

Sidebar: Choosing paint and carpet colors for a big house

You're spending a bundle on a great big house and you want it to look fabulous. What are some tips for choosing a color scheme? Whether a house is large or small, clients always start off wanting a different color for every room. But interior designers always urge restraint because limiting the palette to only one or two colors will look better. It will also cost less because most painters add a surcharge when more than two wall colors are used, explained Susan Orlie.

Though some clients fear that only one color for the walls and carpet will be boring, it ties the house together visually and creates an "interior envelope." To avoid monotony, subtle variations can be introduced by using different intensities of the paint color for larger and smaller rooms, or for different walls within the same room, and different textures for the carpets, said interior designer Susan Gulick. For example, she would use one carpet treatment for the second floor, and another one that's more durable for the stairs. On the main living level she would install hardwood with area rugs made of a third type of carpeting, and in the basement she would get a fourth type of carpet with greater texture and pattern. To arrive at the right-for-you color choice, Gulick suggests looking at the fabrics for your furniture or drapery. If you have an oriental rug that you plan to put in your living room, the colors in it could be the place to start. If you know you will be lean on furniture initially, she recommends starting with the colors of the cabinets and counters for your new kitchen.

Knowing that it's hard to pick a paint color from a small paint chip and that buyers fret about making poor choices, Orlie always instructs her painters to paint a 3 by 3-foot square section of wall on both sides of a corner in each room. Then she has the buyers take a look in the morning, afternoon and night, because the color will not be the same throughout the day. Sometimes the buyers change their minds - "I didn't know it would be so bright or so yellow" - but more often the sample test serves to confirm their choices and to get comfortable with the idea that paint colors will not be static - "Oh my gosh the sun is rising and my pink wall looks yellow and in the afternoon it looks good."

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