Bland Is Boring: Why Decorating For Resale Is Ruining Interior Design (& Your Home)

Ah, resale value. It's a term you hear thrown around in real estate circles quite often, to define how much money a home improvement adds or subtracts from the overall sales price of a home. 

As a professional interior designer, I firmly believe that's where discussion of resale value should stop. In recent decades, sadly, the concept has become a slippery slope, with homeowners using resale value as their sole guide for dictating the designs, furniture, and color choices of the homes they live in. While I appreciate that people want to make smart investments, I'm going to passionately argue that making design decisions based solely on resale value is not only a waste of time, energy, and money: It's also blatantly ruining your home, making your life more boring, and destroying the interior design industry as a whole.

Extreme? Well, that's because the industry-wide focus on "designing for resale value" has, in fact, created a world full of people afraid to take risks beyond the mass-approved beige, gray, and white. The value of design is so much deeper than the cost and return you can see on paper. Don't get me wrong, I'm not waging a war on neutrals — I adore them as an essential component of any palette. However, "playing it safe" with basic, boring design schemes for the sake of a vague future buyer's potential approval is the polar opposite of what interior design — and homeownership! — is supposed to be about. So, please, I'm begging you from the bottom of my design-loving heart, hear me out on why you should stop putting up with insipid, uneventful design decisions in your home, and instead create an exciting home aesthetic tailored just for you.

The primary argument people make for using resale value as the driving force for their design decisions is money. Keeping the best return on investment (ROI) at the forefront for home projects seems like sound financial advice ... on paper. There is advice everywhere warning homeowners to avoid home projects with the worst return value, encouraging "smart" renovations that will result in the highest monetary increase on your property. However, when the future property value becomes the entire focus of the project, the result is often a dull, unimaginative, cookie-cutter design that the real estate industry deems the most "sellable" to the masses. 

Now, if you're planning to sell your home tomorrow? Sure. But if you're living in your home for years to come, and if we then look at the "time is money" principle, such advice doesn't take into account all the time you'll spend enjoying an "ill-advised" design renovation like wildly colored cabinets, customized features, or so on. That's your personal ROI. It shouldn't be ignored. 

Even then, these standard metrics ignore that even these mysterious "future buyers" might just like the same custom features you do. As an interior designer, I'll tell you that unless you are planning something wildly impractical and unconventional, like removing all of the bathrooms (don't do that!), other people also enjoy quirky features. Sure, you may lose some buyers over "polarizing" design decisions, but alternatively, if another buyer is into it, such unique features can actually help your home sell for more money. 

At the end of the day, renovation and decorating cost some serious cash. Why on earth would you waste it trying to make some fictional future buyer happy instead of yourself?

Anyone who's either remodeled their house or built one from the ground up will tell you that — even in the smoothest situations — you'll eventually feel decision fatigue. Every small decision adds up, and in the end, you'll notice whether you love, hate, or feel indifferent about each of them. It makes no sense to give yourself headaches choosing between a bunch of "factory model" designs that you're not thrilled about instead of choosing something an aesthetic that excites and ignites you. Day-by-day, as you live in your blandly designed home, each time you confront the basic design will feel like a buzzkill instead of an expression of your personality.

You've living in your home. You're spending tons of money on every feature. Each room should feel like you, not a run-of-the-mill real estate listing photo. Boring, uninspired design for the sake of the masses is a waste of your valuable, finite time and energy. And speaking of time, draining your precious energy designing for someone else means time you have lost truly enjoying a unique home. In my career, so many people I have worked with — those who have taken a leap on a bold design choice that they love — always say, in the end, they only wish they had done it sooner. Learn from their delays or indecision. Just do it already. Life is short, so spend it living in a home that lights up your soul and makes you happy every day. That's what interior design is all about.

Okay, so even if we put time, energy, and money aspects aside, here's the biggest reason this topic bothers me so much as a designer. These safe, formulaic "designs," meant to appeal to a broad range of potential future buyers, are not only utterly uninspiring (and, frankly, often ugly): They create generic, boring homes, with absolutely no personality or unique perspective. 

Homes are supposed to be an expression of the homeowner. That can't be achieved if the driving force is less about them, and more about the fear of offending some future owner. That's why the soulless designs we're seeing in the industry, more and more, are so lacking in vision, inspiration, and creativity. Do you really want to live in a home like that, just because your real estate agent says it'll appeal to the masses?

None of this is the fault of homeowners. They're just trying to be smart with investments, and the real estate world tells them that personality is too hard to sell. But seriously, consider an impactful design that really sticks in your mind. I would bet good money that it had a very distinct point of view — one that required decisions that could be viewed as "risky." Guess what, it paid off, because it leaves a lasting impression. Bland, overly cautious design never does. Even if buyers can't quite put their finger on what makes a home feel so special and powerful to them, I guarantee it's because the home commits to a point of view that tells a one-of-a-kind story. 

Besides creating individually humdrum homes, this resale value design mentality has caused industry-wide effects. This mass gravitation to "acceptable" palettes, based on how someone else may monetarily value one's aesthetic, has generally led to people being too afraid to take any design "risks" (i.e. anything that's not the norm) in their own spaces, resulting in cookie-cutter houses with no personality or vision. I absolutely love when a client comes to me that isn't scared of adding a little color or customizing their home in a unique way. For every one of these clients, there are probably 10 others that come in looking for the same insipid, painfully unexciting palette of safe, crowd-pleasing hues (or lack thereof). Heck with the crowd-pleasing options: Let's do better. Make it about you.

The additional fallout from this fear of anything not "sellable" is the swift removal of almost anything with a pop of color or quirkiness from your favorite retailer's shelves. Sure, you can go online and find a wider variety of colors and options, and yes, some stores have made a conscious effort to keep product lines that are bending the rules for some variety. But the overwhelmingly safe, bland decor options on their shelves today have made the in-person shopping experience a bore.

At this point, I hope we're in agreement that allowing your design choices to be dictated by a "future buyer" you have invented in your head, whom may or may not buy your house at some unknown future time, is utterly ridiculous. But if you are still holding out and want to see proof before injecting some life into your space, that's easy: Head to Instagram or TikTok. Social media has pockets of people ignoring the idea of designing for resale. Instead, they're making their house an unapologetic expression of themselves.

Guess what? The results are truly viral. People are so drawn to their creative, alluring, and positively inspirational spaces, proving that the assumption — that the general public is only going to like your home if you play it safe — is far from true. The encouraging thing is that this message is slowly sinking in for more and more people. Still, it needs to be shouted far and wide to really turn this bland ship around, and that's why I'm shouting it now.

So, jump ship with me. Start living in a home that reflects who you are as a person and tells your story. The joy, creativity, and visual interest it will add to your everyday life will make you wonder why you ever waited so long to design for yourself. It's time to tell resale value design to take a hike. It's boring the whole industry to tears, and besides, no one will remember to miss it when it's gone.