It Started At The Mall
So many good ideas come just when you keep your eyes and mind open when walking through a Shopping Mall. Take for example, one of my many trips last year, to Mayfair Mall In Wauwatosa. I will probably murder this spelling but the store I saw one idea in was Ambercombe and Fitch. I never actually went into the store, I just was walking by. In case you don’t know, this store is one of those young folks high-fashion clothes stores.
If you have ever seen the store(they have the same look in other malls that have this chain store), the most prominent thing you see when you walk by is a huge black picture frame that is about 8 feet by 8 feet. This frame is placed on the floor (as I recall) and is directly centered on the double door entry foyer of the store. It leans on the wall about a foot away on the bottom. Inside this enormous picture frame is an artsy , high fashion, black and white photo of some good looking person wearing some good looking clothes. The photo did not strike me as much as this huge fancy black art frame.
Flash-forward a few months and I am working on one of our simplier designs which was “more about” being a low price- point home, and less about style or being artsy in any big way. I have always beleived that folks fall in love with a home with-in 60 seconds after they enter the home. They may not know why they like the home, but they either fall in love with “something” or “everything” about the home in those 60 seconds or they probably are not going to buy the home. That first immediate impression better be a real doosey! After they fall in love with the home, the prospective home shopper spends the rest of their visit trying to find reasoning and logic to justify WHY they love the home . That is to say, the home shopper falls in love first with the heart, then the head follows.
So anyway, there I was trying to re-examine some of my simplier low cost designs to have a more dramatic first impression. My Dream series R1500 or DT2000 homes are both logically strong. If , for example, I where to write an ad for the Dream DT2000, it would have all the right words. “4 bedrooms, all with walk-in closets, island kitchen that seats 4 stools, a big walk-in pantry, a 16 foot long laundry room, a big 11 by 14 foot multi-purpose room, a great room that would handle 3 full couches and everyone could see the T.V. and fireplace, a dinette that could seat 8, etc, etc, etc.” All the words work to entice folks to look at the home. The problem is that visitors to the actual home were not having that head-over-heals WOW effect when they walked into the front door.
Flash-back to the mall. The direct view when entering is to look across the great room(on the front area of the home) and to see a dinette and kitchen on the back of the great room, across the rear of the home. There is a patio door and a kitchen sink window on this back wall. If you really want to entice someone to come into a home, you need to work on giving them a beautiful focal point to focus their attention on. When they enter, We want them to be drawn into the home. They need to see something unusual or pretty, or striking. There is nothing striking about a patio door or a kitchen sink window. I don’t care if you make that patio door into a nice Pella french door or even if you put stained glass on the door, this is not striking in the way that a unified , well designed home should offer something “new” or “fresh” to look at that the home shopper has never seen before.
If the home shopper falls in love with some new Pella window shape or some new cabinet door style, all they may end up doing is buying that feature to put into the home they really fall in love with. I could accomplish the WOW factor goal by , say, opening the rear ceiling over the entire back of the home to be a story and a half tall with stacked windows. I could curve the entire back wall of the home so the circular design creates something most unusual. I could create some elaborate beams or wood panels to form a strikingly rich presence. There is a lot that money can do to create that WOW factor. These cost effective homes however, do not have the luxury of having a budget that would allow such extravagance. To succeed, the Mall’s big picture frame came to mind.
I thought of this frame and wondered why exactly was that frame so interesting? Was it the size? Was it the dark striking black color? Was it the placement of it on the floor? I asked and pondered myself and found it was probably a little of each. It was also the mere fact that this was just so unusual but yet classy. The answer seemed to then pop into my head that it might be eye-popping to the first impression if I could build such a frame around my patio door(which was in my first line of sight into the home) . The problem would be that the bottom of the frame would be a tripping hazard, so I thought I could potentially achieve the same effect if I eliminated the bottom of the frame. I would now have a 3 sided frame with no bottom. To light this frame, would add more drama and draw attention to it even more. So, I started to imagine attaching the frame to the ceiling ,with no gap, just about a foot in front of the patio door . I could then put a track light between the wall and frame and back light the frame inside that 1 foot gap. At night, the effect would be wonderous!
At this point, I had decided to create the low-cost version of this elegant frame by making this whole thing out of rough lumber and cover it entirely with drywall. I could angle the drywall frame edges so it looked like an art frame. The 2 side verticals of the frame would also be attached to the floor and ceiling. The positioning would not take away any furnishing abilities or space. I could use a dark cabinet wood stain in the home and then imitate the darkness of the cabinet color by using a similar paint color on the drywalled art frame.
Once this effect was designed, I would then go and re-imagine using the same frame style to go around or over the sink window area. This would create uniformity and not make this one design element an orphan item in the home. The next element to continue this design “framing” was to take the 2nd wall in the dinette and “dress” that wall with a very slight releif into the wall suggesting a frame is boardering that entire rectangular wall section, just like around the patio door.
I recently built my first design of this nature and unveiled it this past weekend in our DT2000 in Milwaukee. I am so happy with the results that I have already designed it into several other of our designs including the entire back wall fo our R1500 Dream Series ranch. The dozen, or so, guests who have already veiwed the home have all been falling in “love” with this element (and therefore the home) with-in 60 seconds after they walk into the home.
Unfortunatly, this home is sold and will only be able to be viewed for the next few weekends at this 91st and Good Hope, Milwaukee location. I took this art framing one last step. This home also has a finished basement and I have put this element into the basement on a 16 foot long wall. The effect is that the frame is for centering your big-screen theatre tlevision.
I hope you will have some time to see this totally new idea(well, not totally new, if you are a mall visitor), in home decor. I also hope you will, as always, leave your comments and questions for me on the blog. This is indeed an exciting and fun business to be in. Thanks for reading.
This last weekend, we had record breaking visits to the website and I thank you all.
Blessings,
Tom Hignite
