Reply to Is this the fate of all trendy, builder-grade homes?

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[quote=Anonymous]There's an okay way of doing it and a bad way of doing it. I mean, if they are going to build homes, they have to have some kind of design choices, and there is nothing wrong with choosing what is currently in style.

But you should never choose a trendy design choice over practical livability or functional concerns, and when you build houses on spec, you should keep design choices minimal and unobtrusive.

We live in a home that was built by a developer in 2013, and it doesn't look dated. It has white marble counters in the kitchen and bathrooms, hardwoods (dark finish but a neutral brown - not cherry or blonde) throughout the house (white tile in the bathrooms), and brushed nickel hardware throughout. Stainless steel appliances. Cabinets are white shaker style. All of this was the developers choice and it's fine. We've done things like replaced most of the light fixtures (what was hear was all super modern looking but cheap, like probably whatever they could get in bulk, and we've replaced with more classic lighting. We've painted throughout, done some wallpaper in the foyer. I think we could sell tomorrow and the only thing in our house that looks a little dated to me is the backsplash in the kitchen, but due to the design of the kitchen it's only a relatively small area and it doesn't look awful (neutral tone small mosaic tile with some color variation), just probably not what someone would pick in 2023.

What I see in other developer-built houses that I am glad we sought to avoid when we bought: any kind of sliding "barn door", vessel sinks anywhere including powder rooms, engineered hardwoods in gray or very light finishes, trendy flooring patterns, super modern details like floating stairs. Some of that stuff looks good in a home that is thoughtfully designed to the taste of a specific homeowner (I've seen some nice herringbone flooring, for instance) but it's too aggressive of a design choice for a developer to choose and, since they will go with builder grade everything, is likely to look bad quickly.

The only builder grade finish that actually annoyed me was the paint. They used such an aggressively cheap matte paint that we had to repaint every single square inch of the house, even places where we went with the same color but had to use a higher grade paint just for functionality. The original paint job marked up with the slightest contact and was impossible to clean. We painted the master bedroom, living, dining, and kitchen when we moved in, but couldn't decide on the rest of the house right away and so lived with that awful paint for 2 years while we did the other rooms piecemeal. I was so glad when we finally covered up the last of it.[/quote]

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