Lynn Korda and Jules Kroll raised four children in a 5,900-square-foot home in Rye, N.Y. But now that their children are grown, they have decided to upsize, as builders say, and are planning a new house of at least 8,000 square feet.
While Charles and Elaine Evans’s three children were growing up, their country house in East Hampton, N.Y., had only one bathroom in its 980 square feet. Now that the youngest is 26 and on his own, the Evanses have more than doubled the house’s size — adding 1,000 square feet, including a second story and two bathrooms. “Our means finally caught up with our past desires,” Elaine Evans said.
The Krolls and the Evanses are joining the growing ranks of empty-nesters who are rejecting the traditional image of mature homeowners as people intent on cutting back and gearing down. With the last tuition check canceled and the pounding music just a ghostly echo, more couples past the breeding age are finally asking themselves how they really want to live. And surprisingly the answer often is: big.
The building industry is feeling the effects of these expansive feathered nesters. While it is a trend primarily affecting the high end, most of more than 40 builders and developers interviewed said such clients have altered the industry.
“We’re beginning to see the impact of baby boomers as they enter their 50s,” said Boyce Thompson, editor of Builder magazine, which devoted a special section to housing patterns of older buyers. “These people have a desire for larger houses and more luxuries. It has nothing to do with the needs of their children.”
Thomas Bowman, a builder in Huntington, N.Y., said that half of his business is from couples with adult or nearly adult children. “One might think that the older buyers would be thinking of consolidating and making life simpler, but no, they aren’t,” he said. “These are people who gave up a lot for a lot of years, and now they are looking for quality of life.”
The National Association of Home Builders estimates that in the year 2000, the average American house will have 2,500 square feet, up significantly from 1,900 square feet in 1977. “Everybody wants four bedrooms when they only use two for sleeping,” said Gopal Ahluwalia, the association’s director of research. “And in California, every house has to have three fireplaces that never get used.”
At the same time, the average number of occupants per house is dropping. “It is now at 2.6,” he said.
But increasingly, occupancy is a relative term, in more ways than one. Inspiration for these big houses frequently is the hope that the family — especially grandchildren — will like the new surroundings enough to want to visit. Often.
Elaine Evans said that even though her children had to make do with sharing the bathroom, she hoped that the new expanded house would “pay off with the grandchildren.”
Builders of custom houses speak of being asked frequently to design special features calculated to impress youngsters, including sunken ball courts, built-in bunk beds, small video arcades and pinball parlors.
“We tell people how they can design a house to be attractive to kids,” said Orren Pickell, a home builder in Chicago. “First, we suggest finishing the lower level and then putting in all the things the parents won’t let them do at their own home, like video games, pool and Ping-Pong tables. It’s a bribe, but so what? It works.”
Builders call the houses they are designing for this powerful new market “entertainment houses,” “homesteads,” “quarterly houses” or “transitional homes” — anything, it seems, but “empty nests.”
“I could easily plan the perfect house for the past 26 years,” said Lynn Kroll, 53, who is interviewing architects to build on a piece of land next door to their present home. “I can only begin to think about how to plan for the next 26 years.”
She is already dreaming of a larger kitchen with more counter space (“I used to need lots of floor when the kids were underfoot,” she said. “Now, I need counter space for all the helping hands I’ll have”).
Kroll said she would also like a proper library for those books that she will now have the time to read, a private sitting room, a billiards room and perhaps quarters for a live-in housekeeper.
And the dining room will have to be very large for family get-togethers (“God willing, I hope there will be lots of people someday,” she said).
David Schless, the executive director of the American Seniors Housing Association, a trade group in Washington, said: “It’s a trend affecting a thin segment of the population at the well-to-do end of the market. Most people stay in the same home for as long as they possibly can.”
The current empty-nest generation is also the first one to have so many two-career, two-income families. Furthermore, it is not a foregone conclusion that earning stops with retirement, as many older people are starting second careers late in life.
“People are beginning to catch on to the possibility of a second adulthood,” said Gail Sheehy, the author of “New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time” (Random House, 1995). “They are retiring earlier and earlier and living longer. It used to be as life contracted, so did the living space. Now, life is opening up after 50, so why not open up your surroundings?”
Adrienne Tindall describes herself and her husband, Jack, as “barely in our 60s.” The Tindalls spent 28 years raising their four daughters in what she calls “a regular 3,500-square-foot house,” near Chicago. “I always thought we’d just move into a condo from there,” said Tindall, who has her own home-based sacred-music publishing business.
But Jack Tindall, an engineer, had always nursed a dream of building his own house. When their youngest daughter reached her mid-20s, they found that the value of their old house had appreciated enough that they could afford to build a new 6,000-square-foot homestead nearby: about as far from a generic condominium as imaginable, it is a timber-framed, lodge-style affair with fieldstone walls.
Since the new house was completed eight years ago, all of the Tindalls’ four grown daughters have lived there at various times, some with husbands and children while their own new homes were being finished. As in so many contemporary houses, the living room and dining room, fast becoming as obsolete as the vestigial appendix, have been replaced by a Great Room. This one truly fits the bill, at more than 1,100 square feet.
Need and desire have never been forced bunkmates when it comes to the high end of the housing market. And one of the enviable tasks for these affluent older buyers is to figure out what their desires are.
As a builder with a keen marketing sense, Pickell understands the whims and wants of couples who are just waking up to their newfound freedom, and he has built elaborate concept houses to whet their appetites.
“I sit them down and say, `There’s no one living with you now, so why should you live the same way?’ ” he said. “And they always look at me as if the thought had never occurred to them.”
Pickell thinks about it plenty and has suggestions for those who, he says, have “forgotten how to live on their own.”
For instance, families with children need lots of doors that can be shut to cut out noise and insure privacy. With just a spouse around, he tells them, why not dispense with a few?
Then there are quarterly rooms.
“People tell us they only use the living and dining rooms on holidays,” Pickell said. “So, we call them quarterly rooms,” meaning that they are used only about four times a year. “And we treat them like art on the walls — just to be looked at,” he added. There might even be two master suites, one downstairs for the owners and one upstairs for visiting children with grandchildren, possibly with a separate entrance.
