Left: Dawn Davidson, Chairman and CEO of Design Line Interiors
Right: Nancy Keenan, President of DAHLIN

If you think you are in love today with a house, one could well argue that acquiring it right now makes sense. But this is clear only if in your heart you are really in love with it."

That these words come from none other than Robert J. Shiller, the Yale University emeritus professor who shared the Nobel Prize for economics in 2013 – and not a realtor or new home company marketer – clocks in as a head-turner. Yes, he's the same Bob Shiller of the Case-Shiller house price index, and very one who foresaw disaster leading up to the GFC, featuring one of housing's most catastrophic crashes in 2007-08-09-10, etc.

As the assertion – especially the six words, "acquiring it right now makes sense" – and the one who expressed it in his inimitable way sink in, both the challenge and the opportunity of the moment vibrate.

The challenge and the opportunity, simple to recognize and hard to do, are to get people to – as Dr. Shiller puts it – answer "yes" to this condition in connection with a new home you may offer for them to buy ...

if in your heart you are really in love with it."

As for why – with perfectly sound reasoning – a prospective homebuyer with the discretionary means might remain undeterred, unswayed by doubts of paying more now than were they to wait some weeks or months for prices to drop, and choose now to move ahead with a home purchase, Shiller writes:

It is a deep-seated emotion that may have no logical connection with any extreme forecasts. Most people stay in their purchased homes for many years. Their identities, their sense of meaning, their love tend to be all tied up in their home."

Quicken a human being's pulse with a home or a homebuying experience that sparks emotion, and you can bypass the need to lower a price barrier, for you'll be raising your buyer's sense of the value they're getting, a value animated by love.

Love conquers all, you might say, even the fear of catching residential real estate's proverbial falling knife.

Apropos of the role of igniting that kind of emotional driver that can weather a stretch of macroeconomic stress and turbulence, we're seeing a smart trend at work in a news announcement today, the combination of DAHLIN Architecture | Planning | Interiors and Del Mar, California-based Design Line Interiors.

A press statement about the acquisition notes:

[DAHLIN] will also be expanding its multiple practice team of accomplished designers dedicated to serving the needs of clients by offering best-in-class talent in interior design, installation, and procurement services. Effectively immediately, the firms have combined interior design and procurement services as Design Line Interiors - A DAHLIN Company.

The acquisition offers a platform for growth in a broader spectrum of interior design, including model home, mid-rise, and high-rise design capabilities from Design Line Interiors, while expanding DAHLIN's current offerings in affordable housing, senior living, healthcare, education, and commercial interiors.

But if all this announcement is amounted to an award-winning architectural firm acquiring an award-winning interior design firm, it would be out of place in the context of a story about why prospective homebuyers – with discretionary means to buy [or rent] a new home – would be fired up and inspired to buy now.

Let's peek back at Robert Shiller's piece, where he talks about propulsive motivations among home seekers we've seen since Covid-19's 2020 arrival.

Fulfilling a dream of a new home takes a lot of work but may be a comforting undertaking that can put new structure into people’s lives"

When architects and interior designers fuse together a value offering that – in the minds, hearts, time-banks, and piggy-banks of a prospective customer – removes friction and subtracts parts of that work, the combination can elevate and escalate the visceral experience a customer has as he, she, or they engage with the home or neighborhood. A blended holistic design intention – fusing the place, the architecture, and the interior, experienced in real-time – can cause a shopper to fall in love.

A known pain-point experience home shoppers and buyers speak of is the parallel reality of taking ownership of a new home and the often painstaking job of creating the rich, livable, vibrant experience of a place that has been professionally interior-designed.

We've written here:

The homebuyer's journey, for most mortals, is a rollercoaster ride, dizzying, nerve-racking, up, down, and around. While a white architectural model has its uses in its field, in the emotionally-fraught ideating, seeking, ordering, buying, and moving-in cycle for homebuyers, white models have long been a source of one of the "downs" in the journey.

The "white model" phenomenon works like this. Prospective home seekers tour a builder's model(s), feel their pulses quicken and hearts go pitter-patter as they experience – in person or not – the lushly merchandised inside-and-outside-the-walls uplift. They breathe and feel the life they want to imagine for themselves; they put down their deposit, and they wait out the time it takes to finally settle on the home, take hold of their keys, and then, enter their home for the first time.

Then, it hits them. "This is not my beautiful house!"

Why?

It's a white model, a blank slate, an emotional downer.

Take the friction of that pain point out of the experience, and the opportunity to spark that surge of emotional attachment with a place grows. Less – when it comes to the work a client or homebuyer or renter needs to do to configure a home as they experienced a model or a virtual tour, etc. – is definitely more.

Our clients – builders, multifamily apartment developers, homebuyers, etc. – are asking us to provide a full-service experience," Nancy Keenan, DAHLIN president. "So this more integrated alignment with the Design Line team we've known and worked alongside of for so long allows us to take a more holistic approach to the way homes, the rooms, and the spaces live. That's not just through the lens of the architectural impacts but really how the end user resident lives in and use the space."

In a practical way, blending architecture and interior design can meaningfully simplify and solve for ongoing supply chain chokeholds and disruptions, by synching up materials and products specifications to a single song sheet.

At a higher level, tapping into cross-disciplinary expertise by getting respective technical experts collaboratively engaged in home construction, engineering, development, design, installations, and consumer experience projects to do and be their best exclusively in the context of a unified, aligned, all-for-one-and-one-for-all effort can feel to customers like a simpler, purer experience.

By subtracting complexity and touchpoints and hand-offs – each with delays and cost add-ons and potential for error – those who bring a prospective buyer a home can meaningfully add to the likelihood that customer may fall in love.

Outdoor living trends – and the architecture and interior design solutions that elevated their value and excitement – began to peel back the potential of reimagining exterior, interior, and neighborhood setting in a more mindful, synchronized sense.

When operating as a design team alone, we are always in search of understanding the architect’s intention," says Dawn Davidson, chairman and CEO of Design Line Interiors. "Sometimes communication is stalled and/or we don’t completely comprehend the backstory of the builder/developer/architect and how the plans came together. Being part of such a talented architectural team will result in a deeper knowledge of their craft and a faster turnaround by the design team. Normally, big decisions are left to frame walks, when we are all together seeing the architecture come to life. We will now have their original vision at our fingertips and mentors to help us see and understand the building prior to designing."

Removing the barriers between exterior and interiors of a home with the exponential impact of outdoor living solutions profoundly expanded residents' sense of value as their experience of a home's livability blurred out of the box, into the beyond.

Similarly, removing expertise barriers and synching up design, structure, systems, and neighborhood into an array of intentional experiences that quicken the pulse of a prospective buyer and lower the blood pressure of a current owner, can cause good things to happen.

Join the conversation