Romancing the Model Home

Model homes are arguably the best places for home buyers to imagine their future life. A model can showcase products and designs that buyers might not have considered, and can help them imagine how these features might make life easier and more enjoyable.

Interior designer Mary Cook, president of Mary Cook & Associates, Chicago, says there are many low-cost ways to include great design ideas in a model. "You don't have to spend more money to be remarkable," says Cook, who has designed model homes for builders in 22 states. "But you should be willing to depart from the crowd and become a ‘purple cow,'" she adds, referring to Seth Godin's book "Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable." The point is that once someone has seen enough of anything — whether cows or model homes — they begin to lose interest. The challenge is to reignite that interest.

Cook works with home-building businesses of all sizes, but she finds that production builders of less than 1,000 homes per year are more nimble and more willing to be creative with their model homes than the big guys. One of these is Kensington Homes in Chicago. Even though the people at Kensington don't sell more than 200 homes a year, "they are innovative thinkers and are always pushing the envelope," says Cook. In one of their models, for example, Cook used 12-inch-deep upper kitchen cabinets to line the base of a wall in the breakfast nook. "The effect was to create a butler's pantry/breakfast nook with additional storage and more work surface," she says.

One of Cook's signatures is the combining of stock cabinets and custom moldings to create cost-effective but beautiful built-ins.

In fact, Cook likes to add built-ins to her model designs whenever possible. And by working with the builder's kitchen cabinet supplier and installer, she can usually do so without the need for a custom-cabinet maker. Instead, she creates homes for computers, televisions and stereos by getting cabinet manufacturers to combine their stock items in unique ways, then trimming them with custom moldings.

She has also taken standard baseboards, chair rails and crown molding and reconfigured them to create additional option packages. "Taking the standard trim pieces a builder offers and putting them together in a creative way around door frames offers a more substantial feeling," says Cook.

One design element that Cook has not seen builders take enough advantage of is color, but she believes that builders who are willing to do so would stand out like purple cows in a field of black-and-white Jerseys. "People are afraid to make color choices when buying a house," she says. "A builder could offer four or five color packages, each of which complements [a particular] wood floor, without adding any space or much cost to the model. It's a great way to make it feel like a custom home."

By the way, she does not recommend using purple for this purpose.