Designing for Resale or Designing for You? (Why the Honest Answer Is Usually a Little of Both)

A couple sat down at our studio table not long ago with a set of plans for a house they were about to build, and about ten minutes in, one of them said the thing they'd clearly been rehearsing in the car: "We should tell you, we'll probably have to move again in three or four years." His job moves them every few years, and they'd made peace with it. What they hadn't made peace with was living in another house that felt like it belonged to someone else. They'd looked at plenty of existing homes and walked away from all of them, because they wanted this one to feel like them, even knowing they'd hand the keys to a stranger before the trees they planted had a chance to grow in. So they were building. And they wanted to know how to do that without doing anything so specific that it would cost them at the closing table.

That conversation, or one very close to it, happens in almost every first meeting we have. And it's why there's a question we ask before we talk about a single finish: is this a home you want to design for resale, or is this more of a custom home for you? I've learned not to expect a clean answer, because there almost never is one. What we usually get is a percentage. Seventy percent us, thirty percent whoever comes next. Ninety-ten. Sometimes an honest fifty-fifty with a shrug. And that number, however rough, is one of the most useful things we learn about a project, because it quietly decides where the money goes, how bold the permanent choices get, and how we guide you through everything that follows.

It's also a bigger question than it used to be. Houzz's 2026 Houzz & Home Study found that 44 percent of homeowners now call their house a forever home, and 61 percent plan to stay put for eleven years or more after renovating. People are staying. Which means the old advice, keep it neutral, don't scare the buyers, is leaving a lot of people living in houses designed for a stranger who may never show up. So let's talk about how to actually answer the question, and what to do with the answer once you have it.

Start by Sorting Your House into Two Lists

Here's the exercise, and you can do it tonight with a notepad. Make two lists. The first is everything in your home that is hard or expensive to change: tile, cabinetry, countertops, flooring, plumbing locations, windows, the layout itself. The second is everything that is easy to change: paint, lighting, hardware, wallpaper, window treatments, rugs, furniture, art. It goes faster than you'd think, and it's a little clarifying to see how much of what makes a house feel like yours lives on the easy list.

Now take your percentage and lay it over the lists. If you're seventy percent "for us" and thirty percent "for resale," the thirty percent should mostly govern the hard list, and the seventy percent gets to run wild on the easy one. That's not a compromise, it's a strategy. The dining room can be the moody green you've been saving on Pinterest for two years, because the next owner can repaint it in a weekend. The kitchen tile, which is grouted to the wall and priced accordingly, is where a little restraint pays for itself. And your timeline sharpens all of this. If you're moving in today and expect to sell in three years, the hard list needs to lean timeless and steer clear of the trendiest choices, even the ones you love, because a finish that feels fresh this fall can look dated by the time the listing photos are taken. Stay ten years and that pressure eases, since by then the trend has either become a classic or been replaced, and either way you got to enjoy it. The couple from the studio table landed somewhere around sixty-forty, and once they had that number, the decisions got easy: a warm, classic kitchen that will photograph beautifully in four years, and a study painted a deep, slightly unreasonable blue, because it was theirs and a gallon of paint fixes it.

And if you're ninety percent or higher, if this is truly the house you plan to grow old in, then I'll say it plainly: put the hand-painted tile in the kitchen. Do the thing. The whole point of staying is that you get to live inside your own taste, and there is no version of resale math that beats fifteen years of walking into a room you love every morning.

What "Designing for Resale" Actually Means (It Isn't Beige)

I want to clear something up, because "resale" has become shorthand for a gray box with white cabinets, and that isn't what buyers are responding to anymore. I can say that with some confidence because a big part of our work is designing for luxury home builders, and most of those houses are spec homes, designed for a buyer nobody has met yet. Do that enough times and you develop a very practical sense of what the market actually wants: which finishes get compliments at the open house, what sells quickly and what sits. We keep that instinct current on purpose, with trade shows and market weeks every year, showroom visits, manufacturer previews, and a fair amount of reading about where materials and color are headed. What all of it keeps telling us is that value lives in quality, warmth, natural light, storage, and a layout that makes sense. A home that feels collected and warm sells. A home that feels like nobody ever lived in it mostly just photographs fine.

So the resale portion of your answer isn't asking you to be boring. It's asking you to protect a few specific things. Don't take away a bedroom to make a closet, no matter how good the closet would be. Don't build the layout around one very particular way of living, like a kitchen with no room for a table because you only ever eat standing up. Keep the permanent finishes in a family of colors and materials that play well with more than one style, so the next owner's furniture doesn't argue with your countertops. Spend on the things people touch every day, the faucet, the cabinet hardware, the door handles, because quality there reads instantly to anyone who walks through.

If You're Staying, Decide These Things Now

This is the part that gets skipped most often, and it's the part I care about most. When someone tells us this is their forever home, that answer changes our list of questions, and a few of them surprise people. Is there a bedroom and a full bath on the main level, or could there be? Can a doorway be widened by a few inches while the wall is already open? Would a curbless shower work in the primary bath? None of that is about being old. It's about a broken ankle at forty-five, a parent who comes to stay for a season, a knee replacement you didn't plan for. If the walls are open now, these decisions are cheap. Ten years from now they are a renovation.

Lighting is the other one. The lighting that looks gorgeous at thirty-five is dim at sixty, so we plan for layers: overhead you can dial down, task lighting where you actually work, and lamps where you sit. And storage, real storage, in the places life piles up, because the longer you stay, the more you own.

Around Nashville, the forever-home conversation increasingly includes a second little building in the backyard. We've designed several DADUs over the last couple of years, and every one of them started as a different idea: a place for aging parents, a landing spot for a kid home from college, an office, a guest house that pays for itself some months. The best ones are designed to be more than one of those things over time. If you're staying for the long haul, that flexibility is worth more than any single finish in the main house.

The Percentage Is Allowed to Change (Ours Do)

I'll be honest about the limits of this. We ask the question in the first meeting, and we don't always get the final answer, because people don't always know it yet. We've had clients start at fifty-fifty, cautious, talking about a five-year plan, and somewhere around the day the kitchen came together they stopped talking about selling at all. We've also guided people toward the safer tile because they told us resale mattered, and then watched them look at it with a little regret once they realized they weren't going anywhere. Neither of those is a failure exactly, but I've learned to check in on the number as we go, and to say out loud when a decision only makes sense if the percentage is still true. A good designer should be doing that with you. If yours isn't asking, ask yourself.

So, Which Is It?

Probably both, in some proportion that's yours alone. Sort the house into the hard list and the easy list, be honest about how long you really think you'll be there, protect the handful of things that hold value, and then let yourself have the rest. If the answer is "we're staying," design like it, all the way down to the doorways. If the answer is "we'll see," that's a real answer too, and it just means the permanent choices get a slightly cooler head.

And if you'd like someone to ask you the question in person and help you figure out what your number actually is, well, that's what we're here for.