It's your house!

There's a particular kind of caution I hear constantly during design consultations, and it usually sounds like this: "We want to keep resale in mind." On its face, that's responsible thinking. Nobody wants to sink money into a house and then struggle to sell it. When I dig a little deeper into what that actually means for the choices being made — safer cabinet colors, a more generic tile pattern, a layout that plays it neutral instead of one that truly fits how this family lives — I find myself asking a question that doesn't get asked enough: for whom, exactly, are you designing this kitchen?

Here's the part that often gets left out of the resale conversation - even if you make every choice with the next buyer in mind, there is no promise that the next buyer will want any of it. People gut kitchens that were renovated five years earlier all the time, they rip out cabinetry that's barely been used, replace countertops that still practically have the store tags on them, and start over completely — not because the previous work was poorly done, but simply because taste is personal, and the new owner wants their own stamp on the space. I've walked into homes to measure for a new kitchen where the "old" one was, by any reasonable standard, gorgeous. Recently renovated and expensive. The new homeowners wanted it gone anyway, because it wasn't theirs. It was someone else's idea of a kitchen that they happened to be living in.

If there's a real chance that none of it survives past the next closing anyway, the question worth asking is this: is designing around a hypothetical future stranger actually a wise way to spend your money? You can recover some of that investment in the sale price, sure! The cabinets, the countertop you agonized over for three weeks, the backsplash tile you drove forty-five minutes to see in person — those things frequently end up in a dumpster regardless of how safe you played it. At which point, congratulations, you've spent real money engineering a kitchen for a person who doesn't exist yet, might never exist, and if they do exist, still might not like beige any more than the last person did.

I'd rather help a client fall in love with a bold cabinet color or an unexpected tile pattern, chosen thoughtfully and executed well, than talk them into a kitchen so inoffensive it barely has a pulse. There's a real difference between good design fundamentals — proportion, function, quality materials, a layout that makes sense for how the space gets used — and choices made purely to appeal to a future buyer you're guessing about. The first category holds up no matter who owns the house, the second is a bet, and not a particularly good one.