Thoughts for the Weekend & this Week’s Links

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Getting It Back.

It’s dark. Wet. Rain blowing against the window.
I’m waiting for the sun to come up so I can see the trees.

In the meantime, I’m wondering:
why are we obsessed with getting back what we spend on house renovations?

We’ve all been trained to think like developers — to see our homes as financial instruments where the first question is “Will this pay off?” rather than “Will this make life better?”

I used to be a director of a not-for-profit company called the South Coast Design Forum. The idea was to promote the design industry and the value it added.

“Good design adds value” and “Investing in good design pays off” were phrases often trotted out at meetings and presentations. Looking back, I think everyone was talking at cross-purposes — shouting across two very different value systems.

Property value is dominated by location and land, not design.
Architecture adds enormous use value, but limited market value.

The two are incompatible. One values price per square metre and resale uplift. The other values comfort, light, storage, and how a home feels at 6am on a wet morning. Good luck reconciling those two.

Bring Sir Christopher Wren back from the dead to design a terrace house. It would be worth only marginally more than the one next door, designed and built by a competent, jobbing builder.

Fame or brand makes surprisingly little difference to house prices.

Imagine if the price of a painting was driven mainly by the cost of the canvas and the wall it hung on. Your Rembrandt wouldn’t be worth much more than the local watercolourist.

We accept that cars lose value because we understand use.
Yet our homes are expected to be a place to live well, a lifestyle container, and a guaranteed investment.

The sun’s still not up. The darkness is hanging on.

The good news is that build costs are now so high — and the big annual gains in property value largely gone for the time being — that anyone renovating in the hope of a quick return is likely to be disappointed.

Which means that, increasingly, improving your home is about use first, with market value a longer-term consideration.

Perhaps we need to start thinking about the cost of making our homes better in two parts:
1. The basics — new plumbing, heating, kitchens, bathrooms, decoration
2. The gains — better mornings, more light, more storage, less friction in daily life

On a recent project I had costed by a builder, the basics alone technically overcapitalised it. ‘The gains’ were a write-off. Crikey.

But lose tens of thousands on a new car over five years, and no one blinks.
Spend money making your home better for five years, and we ask if it was “worth it”.

Another way of thinking: Stay in the house for five years, and ‘The gains’ cost about £14 a day.

The rain hasn’t stopped, but the sky is starting to lift.

I can see the trees.

All the best

This Week’s Links:

My latest video: Why This “Awkward” House Is Actually Brilliant.

Smart stair landing ideas for every kind of house.

I thought this was quite a good podcast. Although I’ve noticed quite a few videos recently about being better off by not buying. Perhaps, but who benefits if the population are re-trained not to own property? – is where my brain goes.