Design and Renovation

Design, renovation and staging are the areas of guidance in the work of Mike Kobeissi, which covers buying, selling, remodeling and building, and this index looks at the ideas and figures behind changing a house: the age of the stock, the history of its rooms and the craft of presenting them.

Age drives much of the work. Eye on Housing, the research blog of the National Association of Home Builders, reported that about 48 percent of owner occupied homes in the United States were built before 1980, that their median age rose to 41 years in 2023 from 31 in 2005, and that an aging stock points to a growing remodeling market, since older structures need new amenities and the repair or replacement of worn components.¹

Not every project returns its cost. CNBC drew on Remodeling magazine’s Cost vs Value report, which compares what common projects cost with the value they keep at resale: a modest kitchen remodel recouped 68.7 percent on average against 59.7 percent for an upscale one, an attic bedroom 72.2 percent, while a home office sat near the bottom of the list because many buyers would rather have another bedroom.² Taste has its own history. Metropolis reviewed Home Stories, an exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum that told a hundred years of the home, from 1920 to 2020, through twenty interiors, ending among the early Modernist rooms of Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat and Josef Frank’s Villa Beer, with the layered ornament of Elsie de Wolfe’s Villa Trianon beside them.³

Five entries make up the subject: Home Staging, Residential Lighting Design, The History of the Kitchen, The History of Interior Design and The Age of the Housing Stock.