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Home Design

Big Homes, Empty Rooms

Homeowners bought more house than they could handle and now they can't afford to decorate for living or for sale.
Everything's Better With Bacon

Apparently even an eco-friendly house, made out of -- and how would you like your eggs? -- pig meat.
Crummy Photos Kill Sales Dead

Most buyers today preview houses through online listings first, so it's more important than ever to get those listing pictures right.

Do you have friends that love to go out with you, but never invite you to their home? How about neighbors who are super-nice in the yard, but never let you in the house? Don't worry. It isn't you, it's them.

They are hiding a secret that has been kept for years by many homeowners, but the economic decline is causing the veneer of this life of illusion to crack. These friends and neighbors are victims of the American Dream: having the big house to prove you've "made it," but having no money left over to decorate it.

So how did so many people end up real estate rich and decor poor?

mitchell joachim, meat house, terreform ONE, meat habitat

Dr. Mitchell Joachim is putting a whole new spin on the term "grow your own." An architecture and sustainable design professor at New York University, Joachim is also the co-founder of Terreform ONE, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that connects scientists, architects, artists and students in an effort to come up with a few creative solutions for urban sustainability. True to their mission, Terreform ONE has created one of the world's most bizarrely ambitious green habitat projects: a home created entirely from meat.

Designed to be a truly organic "victimless shelter," the scaled-down prototype unit's building materials are grown from pig cells in a lab, meaning that no trees or animals were hurt in the process, then shaped using the same medical techniques used to treat cancer patients.

Bacon anyone?

Bad photos can ruin your chances at selling your home

Internet real estate listings are full of photos of homes for sale, allowing buyers to spend hours looking at pictures. With such a large selection, you'd think that real estate agents would think twice before allowing poorly photographed homes to appear in their listings. But still, there are plenty of ugly listing photos out there.

A home described as a "charming opportunity" doesn't look so charming, lawns need to be mowed, and cameras need to be focused. A website in Seattle keeps track of such detrimental listings, and the photos should be enough to turn a potential buyer away. Even multimillion-dollar homes aren't immune.

But good photos can help a home sell fast, San Francisco photographer Herman Bustamante told HousingWatch. He photographs real estate and has seen $1 million homes sell within a week with professionally taken photos in the listing.

Too many real estate agents will take listing photos themselves to try to save some money, but it will cost them in the long run, Bustamante says.

While homeowners s earthship, biotecture, ecohome

earthship, biotecture, ecohome

cramble to make their pads more environmentally friendly, Joe and Laura Hagar worry that their place might be too earth-conscious. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Colorado-based couple is having major difficulties finding a lender who will refinance their home, a 2,700-foot rancher made out of 17,000 old tires, as well as cans, bottles and plastic plates.

To make the home solid, the whole thing is covered a layer of concrete, clay and stucco. "We lovingly call it the trash house," Ms. Hagar said.

At a time when many companies are downsizing or closing, the home staging business is booming. Home staging was listed as one of seven emerging growth industries according to a 2009 CNN report. The growth is attributed to the stagnant real estate market.

With homes taking longer to sell, there ends up being more homes for qualified buyers to choose from, so a motivated seller is best served by hiring a home stager to make their house stand out from all the rest.

Homes that are professionally staged sell five times faster and for 5 percent more than homes that were not staged.

So what do sellers need to know when hiring a home staging professional?

Don't let the slow real estate market keep you from having the home of your dreams. You don't have to move, you just need to improve. And this is the perfect time to do so.

Never before have all the stars been so perfectly aligned to facilitate the remodeling needed to give you your perfect palace. Materials costs have been lowered to increase sales, building contractors have reduced their fees to attract more clients, and interest rates are the lowest they have ever been. If you've ever wanted to tackle a home improvement task, this is the time to do so.

Here are five good places to start:

Know how to childproof your home this summer

Adults like to reminisce about the carefree, lazy days of summer, but for today's kids, summer vacation is anything but. And the average home isn't necessarily a refuge from danger.

According to Safe Kids Worldwide and U.S. News and World Report, summer is Trauma Season, with an average of 2.4 million children visiting the emergency room and over 2,800 deaths during that 2-month period.

Parents may think that home is the safest place for their children, but 69 percent of children's deaths were from home-related accidents. Children younger than 5 and boys are the most frequent victims. The dangers at home are universal, as illustrated in a recent Jerusalem Post article that reported a new public safety campaign uniting childhood safety advocates with interior designers and architects to come up with solutions to the risks that children face at home.

To find out where the dangers lurk in your home, read on:

Jay Leno's expansive car collection is world-renowned, but "The Tonight Show" host gets a lot less attention for his very green garage. But you don't need to have a 300-car-and-motorcycle garage like he does to make yours eco-friendly.

There are a number of ways to green your garage and create a more eco-friendly and wallet-friendly place to store your cars (and some boxes and bikes and maybe a refrigerator, too).

Earlier this year we told you how to convert your garage to living space, but if you want to keep your garage for cars, there are many simple ways to green your garage space.

Green rooftop

What's not to love about rooftop gardens and terraces in a quiet neighborhood just north of a major metropolitan downtown area? They serve many purposes, especially for a community of seniors in Lakeview, just 4 miles north of the Loop.

Everyone in Chicago seems to be going green these days. Not only was it recently ranked as the greenest U.S. city based on the number of LEED certified buildings, Chicago's City Hall itself boasts a rooftop garden. Now senior living residences are following suit, offering residents the luxuries of green relaxation while making for more efficient and connected buildings in their communities.

Denver Mayor Home

In 1986 TV industry leader and the "Father of Cable Television" Bill Daniels built himself a sprawling mansion known to those in the area as Cableland. Daniels later donated it to the city of Denver, Colo. to use as the mayor's residence. The 19,500-square-foot home includes 88 televisions (64 of which are within the home theater -- each tuned to a different cable channel), 5 phone lines, 97 telephones, 14 bathrooms and 4 kitchens -- this clearly is not your average home.

Add to that the very "Miami Vice" like decor (it's mauve), the fireman's pole in the master bedroom and some other odd interior-design choices -- and you start to get an idea why no mayor has lived in the home. Cableland is often rented out for events, and used by charities at no cost to help raise money, but now Denver is looking to sell it.

And much like the home's decor, this sale is the subject of great debate.

graveyard real estate

Some homeowners aren't worried about block parties, blaring music or their neighbors taking their parking spaces. That's because, according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, an increasing number of homeowners are finding that their neighbors are ... well ... dead.

Whereas cemeteries were once relegated to land far outside of the city, urban sprawl means that everything once distant, including graveyards, is closer to urban centers and the living who reside within. While the peace and quiet that comes with living near the dead is undoubtedly nice (provided, of course, that there are no zombies), there is something undeniably creepy about living next door to a memorial park.

So what does living near a graveyard do to your home value?

The Senate recently voted to extend the $8,000 federal homebuyer tax credit aimed at stimulating sales to September 30, 2010 (it was originally going to end on June 30). So now it looks like an estimated 180,000 home purchasers who were already in the sales pipeline could benefit from the tax credit. [Update: The extension now appears dead in the Senate, after a June 25 vote on it, but the credit still applies to deals closed by June 30].

So what would these lucky new homeowners do with this lucrative windfall -- here are some suggestions for projects to improve the home:

Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is packing up and leaving New York. At least Donald Trump's piece of New York.

Lloyd Webber is selling his Trump Tower apartment for $19 million. The news comes via the U.K.'s Telegraph, where the knighted composer netted plenty of attention recently with the London opening of his latest show, "Love Never Dies," which is a sequel to "Phantom of the Opera." (Although "Phantom" does not really need a sequel, since it's still running at Manhattan's Majestic Theatre on West 44th Street.)

If Lloyd Webber is as successful in this real estate transaction as he's been in theatre, then Lord and Lady Lloyd Webber will be saying goodbye to a stunning view of Central Park, among other pleasures.

But what exactly does $19 million buy these days?

You want home improvement TV show updates? Well, we got them.

This week we bring you updates on recent episodes of "Tough as Nails," "My First Place," "Designed to Sell," "Holmes on Homes," and more.

Here's what you missed....

$75 million unfinished mansion versailles

If you thought the economic downturn and housing crisis would lead to more modest homes, you are wrong -- at least in this case. And in this case you'd be very, very wrong.

It's a 90,000-square-foot mansion listed for $75 million. It sits in a prime spot, on 10 waterfront acres in a gated community outside Orlando, Fla. It has plenty to boast about, including 10 kitchens, a 20-car garage, 13 bedrooms, a bowling alley and an indoor roller rink.

Actually, make that space for 10 kitchens, a 20-car garage, 13 bedrooms, a bowling alley and an indoor roller rink, because the house has one big catch: It's not finished.

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