speaker-0: Yeah, which is exactly what we're talking about. This like excessive square footage, strange layouts, and things that might create the illusion of luxury, but actually don't really serve enough function to justify the investment for most people. So when you go to try to sell a house like this,

speaker-1: The next person's coming in wondering what were you thinking?

speaker-0: Yeah, you're trying to sell a problem that nobody wants. Welcome to Return on Design, the podcast where beauty meets strategy and interiors become assets that perform. I'm your host, Rachel Niederhofer, designer, investor, and builder of high impact spaces that deliver real results. Alongside my husband, I run both a design firm and a real estate investment company. where I live at the intersection of creativity and ROI every day. Each week, I'll be unpacking what most people overlook, how strategic design decisions can grow your investment, elevate your lifestyle, and unlock the full potential of your property. You'll get real tools, proven strategies, and unfiltered conversations with industry experts who are doing it right. So if you're ready to invest with purpose and leverage design as a powerful tool, this podcast is for you. One of the things we consistently see as we evaluate properties is wasted square footage. That shows up, oddly enough, mostly in the larger homes. We see oversized rooms, awkward layouts, and expensive prices that don't actually equate to added value.

speaker-1: And from a real estate standpoint, this has become an increasingly talked about piece of conversation. Buyers are asking not just how much space is there, but how does this space function and feel?

speaker-0: Yes, so welcome back to the show. Today we are going to be diving into why bigger does not always mean better and how to actually position yourself to reinvent these spaces with all of this wasted square footage to maximize your investment and your return on design.

speaker-1: So as we kind of mentioned, you know, one of the biggest problems we see is wasted space. What is one of the, I guess, biggest areas that you consistently see as we walk through these homes where space is wasted or it's not the most, I guess, used or allocated?

speaker-0: There's so many, but one I see consistently is in the master en suite where everything is much larger than it needs to be to the point where there's just dead space everywhere.

speaker-1: Kind of, can put three different seating areas in my master ensuite plus the bathroom plus,

speaker-0: Yeah, it's just unnecessary. Like we looked at a property the other day and I think the total square footage of the house was maybe 6,000 square feet ish, give or take. And the master ensuite alone was probably 1500 square feet, completely unnecessary.

speaker-1: I am. multiple levels within the master on suite. Kind of a weird entryway into it anyways too.

speaker-0: Yeah, you're talking about another one, but that one that you're referring to is that you didn't even have access point to the bathroom without going through the kind of ensuite living room. ⁓ So you would go imagine getting out of your bed, going up two steps. There's a little ensuite living area and then turning around the corner to get into the master bathroom. So it's almost like this whole little apartment. Which you might think, oh, that's so nice and luxurious, but it's not functional for most people. I mean, if you have to get up in the middle of the night to use the restroom, you don't really want to have to go up the stairs and around the corner.

speaker-1: That's a great trip point in the middle of the night in the dark.

speaker-0: Another one ⁓ we looked at recently had, it was beautiful, but it included the bathroom itself was gigantic. It had a massive walk-in shower to the point where you probably had three to four feet to the right side of the shower head.

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah. That shower would actually rival a lot of closets that we've seen. Yeah. master ensuite closets. It was that big.

speaker-0: And then you had the freestanding tub outside of that, which was also probably another three feet from the glass partition of the shower. So just one wall in that bathroom, which was the shower and the tub was, I don't know, by guess at least probably 15 feet. Unnecessary, totally unnecessary. And then it had a long hallway that went into

speaker-1: for a few. 15 feet easy.

speaker-0: the master closet, if I recall.

speaker-1: No, it actually had that little workout room in the back. Yeah, which is great. Which is great little feature. You can go do your workout and you're right there by your bathroom.

speaker-0: It also is only permitted to the on-suite having access to the workout facility. Which pros and cons are on that. But this one was so strange. It actually had, go ahead and let's talk.

speaker-1: the biggest outdoor shower I've ever seen.

speaker-0: And the only access point to the outdoor shower was off the master suite, which it would have made more sense because there was a pool in the back that you could have, you had access to maybe clean off after you got off of the pool when you're already outside.

speaker-1: Yeah, but that was completely the access from there was still all the way around and you still had to have gone through the master suite to get to that outdoor shower. It wasn't over their position close to the pool.

speaker-0: Exactly. Which is why it made it so strange. Just a complete waste of space.

speaker-1: and resource too.

speaker-0: which is exactly what we're talking about. This like excessive square footage, strange layouts and things that might create the illusion of luxury, but actually don't really serve enough function to justify the investment for most people. So when you go to try to sell a house like this,

speaker-1: The next person's coming in wondering what were you thinking?

speaker-0: Yeah, you're trying to sell a problem that nobody wants.

speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, with that outdoor shower, like you said, had that been positioned actually closer around by the by the pool itself would have made sense to, you know, just jump out, rinse off or, know, kind of like you see it a lot of luxury pools and areas like that where they have kind of the outdoor rinse off shower, dry off and go in, you know.

speaker-0: It was strange and it just goes to prove that square footage really only matters when it makes sense. You can't just have square footage for the sake of creating a bigger space. If you haven't defined the function of it, odds are you're probably not going to get that return that you're looking for.

speaker-1: Yeah, you've kind of mentioned that like when you have these extra spaces, they fail quite often in the real estate market. And I think a lot of times that's because being undefined, there's no intentional use to how they're used. they become dead zones. become just, ⁓ I'm just going to throw this here and I'm going to throw that there. And then they become just piled up areas of stuff instead of actually supporting the lifestyle and being intentional and intuitively used.

speaker-0: Yeah. And I would say as a note to like identify, OK, what what is a strange layout? You know, there's kind of a rule of thumb. If it takes me more than two times to walk through the home, the floor plan, and I still can't remember, like, wait a minute. What was this space or or how does this connect to the kitchen or like where I'm located? It's probably confusing. I've seen this a lot also with homes that are multilevel and you have multiple stairs going upstairs, you can kind of get a little disoriented with like, what is this floor plan? Where am I? I'm starting to get turned around in here. If I can't define the flow as I'm walking through and evaluating the space within two walkthroughs, like it's a chaotic floor plan to me.

speaker-1: Yeah. And you know, we've, we looked at some where it's like, okay, I've got this bonus room and I go up two more stairs over here and I've got another kind of bonus or game area or media up here. And we could have redefined some of this to be like, Hey, we could have put an extra bedroom up here or an extra bathroom and we could have, we could have played this out and you know, how many spaces do we need to quote unquote, sit and gather. when you've got five to choose from, where are you going? Yeah.

speaker-0: Which is a great point, because really what qualifies a room as a bedroom is a closet. you can create like if you're building a house that let's say you're a builder or even an investor, you're flipping a property, whatever, even a homeowner. And you want to build that media room. You know, put a closet in there where that room can be dual function if you go to resell it. Because if you're just creating a big open canvas of. 200 to 400 square feet and there's no storage capacity, that's wasted square foot.

speaker-1: Yeah, at minimum, having that closet, you just created a storage capacity for it.

speaker-0: Exactly. If you put the closet in there in advance, now you can reposition that as a bedroom or, you know, whatever the next person might want to use it as versus if you have no closet and you have this massive room that nobody wants.

speaker-1: Yeah, but even as even as a game room, you know, you have that closet to now I have a place to store extra games and things like that, instead of just having it all piled up in the corner over here or having to buy a bigger piece of furniture to store all of that. You know, you've you now have given the room itself more open usability and you still have the storage aspects. buyers are looking for that. They're honing in on that. how does, again, how does this space functionally fit and work for me? Not just how much space is there.

speaker-0: Exactly. Which is why staging is so valuable. Because when you can define a space, it's going to move a property. It's going to help position to maximize that return that you're putting into it. If this space cannot be defined with function, it's almost always guaranteed to be a fail. We see this so much in the luxury space where it's all about trying to be impressive or have this grandeur impressive wow vibe when you come in. But then they lack that function. And you can immediately or I know I can immediately start to tell like, where they've cut corners where they've kind of haven't thought through logistically of what how that grand drawer foyer is affecting the architecture that's affecting you know, the room next to it. and how it sort of ripples around. And that's where we'll see a lot of wasted space. Another great area, which I see mostly this happens in that really high end market, is where the foyers are just huge, two, 300 square feet of just nothing.

speaker-1: I think that happens in a lot of the higher end market just because a lot of builders and people are trying to create an even bigger illusion of that grand jour as you were talking about. mean, there's the wasted space in smaller homes and you can see that. And from a real estate and the marketing set point, a well laid out floor plan with the least amount of wasted square footage, you can easily make a, just throw off some numbers here, but a 3000 square foot home. feel like it's 4500 because it's actually intentionally laid out and the space is not wasted. It feels just as big as that other home because you can actually use and utilize every bit of it and it fits and supports the lot.

speaker-0: which is why like when people are building or even architects are working on a floor plan, you know, you need to be thinking like this room is going to have the capacity to hold a king size bed or a queen size bed. You know, it's a forethought ahead of time, not just I want it 400 square feet or I want 200 square feet. That doesn't, that doesn't equate to a reality of function. And I think that's where people miss it, where they might be starting off with You know, how many square feet do you want? I want 5,000 square feet versus I want six bedrooms and four bathrooms and ⁓ one living room and whatever the list is. And you kind of start to create from a more livability standpoint and back into that.

speaker-1: Yeah. And that is the shift that we're starting to see more in real estate, you know, that I think is again, you know, buyers are looking at what is the functionality, what is the flexibility of using the space and how can I, how does it fit my life and our growing needs? Like how can it, and will it support going forward? You know, again, the multiple levels in one room, you know, as we talked about in another episode of aging in place and stuff like that, that could become a potential issue going forward.

speaker-0: Yeah, buyers are really not wanting to have to fix properties.

speaker-1: No, they want to come in and it's ready for me to move in, go, done. And so from an investor standpoint, that's something to be thinking about as we look at other properties and we're evaluating, where's the wasted space? Where's potential to make this more usable, more functional and maximize the usability of the home?

speaker-0: Yeah. Could you add on another bedroom? Could you throw in another bathroom?

speaker-1: Yeah, because we've seen several of them. We've seen several homes that it's like, I can take and convert this to another room real quick and easy. And it fits lifestyle. It fits. It's going to fit my buyer, my in buyer much better.

speaker-0: let's evaluate a couple more, let's share with the listeners a couple more really interesting properties that we've seen where, you know, things are sort of out of order. And I think this also can correlate to geography, like geographical locations and culture and history, because we've seen different things in different ages of homes. it used to be that having a prep kitchen was important for entertaining and maybe you had help that was doing more cooking while you were entertaining. So we've seen several older homes that have sort of these smaller back kitchens that are not really applicable for what people are looking for today. Even in the luxury space, you don't see that that much. And you can have kind of strange entry points and ways that you can reconfigure to modernize that and really get a return on design is where my mind would go. But what's ⁓ another property? What about the one that recently we looked at where they had a whole kitchen upstairs?

speaker-1: Yeah, that one. And that's what I was kind of thinking of again with what you were just mentioning of like ways that you could re lay that out, especially as an investor or a homeowner is taking a small kitchenette like that. Sometimes there's actually another bedroom off the side of this. You could completely close it off and build actually a small apartment over there that you could rent out as an extra as an added income. If that was something you were interested in. But yeah, we looked at that.

speaker-0: house. It was I think six bedrooms.

speaker-1: This one was a six bedroom, upstairs was a bonus room, a bedroom and a small kitchenette. Right off the bonus. Yeah.

speaker-0: with off the bonus, ⁓ which was a good square footage. It had a scene, a fridge, an island, I think a dishwasher. Yeah. Just kind of in the middle of my

speaker-1: Microwave, I mean the only thing it didn't have was a stove.

speaker-0: It was very custom to whoever wanted that and it didn't really equate to value add for that square footage.

speaker-1: Yeah, because there was no intentional, the only way to actually access that was through the main living area of this home. So it was very much designed for like, maybe the best way I could figure it was they were trying to create kind of a apartment setting for maybe an older child.

speaker-0: I don't know it's a knee.

speaker-1: I even then it didn't. It was I wasn't 100 % sure on that. was. It was hard to figure out.

speaker-0: We see stuff like this all the time. We don't see too many kitchenettes upstairs. Usually it'll be like a mother-in-law sleep with a private entry or something. But in this case, yeah, it was maybe for the kids to kind of like do their own thing. I'm not sure. But it's just honing in on the point of more square footage doesn't equate to more value. And these are things that can make properties sit really long on the market. You know, it's just awkward. But it does position investors to come in and really reconfigure spaces, negotiate to get that price point down lower.

speaker-1: Yeah, because wasted space or undefined spaces are often opportunities. You know, being able to come in and re redesign that space a little bit to make it fit and, you know, fit with the form and function of a home creates the value, not just added space. And that's in big homes and small homes.

speaker-0: Yeah. And another thing from a strictly a design perspective is like furniture. kind of shifting gears away from the weird kitchen upstairs. But when we have really big rooms, oversized rooms, several things happen. Somebody might fall in love with the grandeur of the space. Maybe it is a beautiful layout and it's something people do want. But then there's often a struggle of what do I put in here? and sort of using furniture to kind of create function to define really large spaces. It can be a pro or a con depending on perspective, but it's something to keep in mind for, you know, what is the required investment that I'm also going to put in to make this space functional for myself. If you're like an end buyer or you know, you do want to hire a designer, like, yeah, just added cost of furnishings and still focused on defining space.

speaker-1: Yeah, because with that layout and the proper furniture, if the furniture is too small, it makes the space feel awkwardly big. Well, your is off. Scale is important. So I guess that's what I'm trying to

speaker-0: Yeah. So a few more, let's give a few more ideas on ways you can kind of reconfigure space that maybe you're not using in your house. Like if you're a listener and you're like, ⁓ great, I'm not an investor, but I do have this, you know, space in my house and I just don't use it. One thing we see a lot is ⁓ dining rooms.

speaker-1: Yeah, the formal dining room that gets used once or twice a year.

speaker-0: It's usually a decent sized room and it's not always practical for people. So you can kind of create a flex space here. Maybe depending on your life, know, home office. We've seen that a lot. Children's play area. I mean, there's a lot of

speaker-1: There's a lot of different ways you can take and redefine that space to be usable and help, you know, support your lifestyle or the lifestyle of whom you're in buyer or

speaker-0: Yeah, if you have a maybe an entryway that's not functional, maybe you want a mud bench, but you know, creating defined drop zones, places where you can sit down, maybe put your shoes on and off or things like that. When you start thinking.

speaker-1: This the kids throw their backpacks. need to put their backpacks when they come home from school. This is where you hang your purse.

speaker-0: When you start thinking through the lens of function, you can start defining the space more strategically and maximizing. Here's another example we've done recently on a design remodel is we had a client who had a whole room that was probably close to 200 square feet and they just were not really using it. It was right off the kitchen and it had just become this sort of dumping zone for all of the stuff they didn't deal with day to day. and they had a very small pantry. And so the laundry room was directly across from the pantry, but it was also kind of small and just a little awkward. And what we did was we relocated the washer dryer to this wasted room that wasn't being used. We converted the washer dryer room into the pantry, redesigned the kitchen, removing that existing built-in pantry. and now maximized the square footage, the livability and the function of the kitchen added in that walk-in pantry that also added function and allocated an actual function to a room that had no purpose at all.

speaker-1: And I'll say this, we did all of this without having to add square footage to the existing structure, which a lot of people think, ⁓ to make it more functional, I need to add square footage. No, sometimes it's just relaying out that square footage. Yeah. Because by doing that, by moving that pantry to what was the laundry room, you made your pantry, I think, probably three times the size of what it was, which would actually this family who, you know,

speaker-0: walk in here.

speaker-1: They've got a couple of kids. They've got, you know, growing kids, big kids. It added probably another, I'm going to estimate probably 30 square feet to the kitchen itself, giving you more functional usable area, livable area to support their lifestyle. Yeah. You know, but we didn't change out and we didn't change the layout of the house, really. I mean, we didn't, you know, add square footage and do all that. We just made it more functional.

speaker-0: Yeah, it was a win-win. So, you know, if you're listening and you're thinking, ⁓ I have a space like this in my house that just isn't working. I mean, that's like the place to start is diagnose like what isn't working for you and why. And then it could take you into the next step of, okay, what could be a solution for this to make it work for me better? And that's one way to really start dissecting like, am I maximizing all of my square footage? Is it? functional for my family in my life and is there ways to improve it and maximize, you know what I have put into this property and as an investment. Same is true when we're flipping a property, we're evaluating like, okay, I see how this space was maybe used at one point, but how could it be used better today? How could I maximize how somebody could actually live and function in this space? And you go through kind of the same evaluation where now You know, we're redirecting those wasted spaces, wasted square footage and maximizing, getting that return on design that I put in on so much.

speaker-1: And I mean, as, as investors, yeah, you've got to look at what doesn't fit, what doesn't work so that we can fix it and put it in to a usable so that the buyers are going to respond to, you know, because buyers, again, they're, they're looking at what is the usability, what is the functionality and the flexibility of the space.

speaker-0: And that's ultimately going to help move your property faster. And, you know, to start thinking through the lens also when you are evaluating properties, like don't don't shy away because it's a lot of square footage because it could be a huge opportunity to come in and have a much larger profit margin on your flip. know, in the past, we've had fellow investors like, ⁓ I can't go over three thousand square feet. It's too much. But if you're taking you know, that three bedroom and you're able to maximize it into a four or five bedroom. Well, now you're on a totally different return perspective. OK, so big takeaways from today that hopefully we have articulated to you as our listener is, you know, excess does not mean better and having true defined space and maximizing what is already existing. consistently outperforms just wasteful, large square footage.

speaker-1: Yeah, I'd say with that the greatest return on design or spaces that are intentional and fit, they're meaningful. They contribute to our everyday lifestyle and not just spaces there. So if you're renovating, you're ⁓ looking to evaluate new properties, see what's out there. Don't just look at how big is it. Let's look at where's the wasted space. Where's the potential to create a better space that fits my lifestyle or my client's lifestyle. and how we can intentionally lay this property out to maximize our investment and maximize our returns so that we can move forward with a lot more. If this is something that interested you, you want to hear more topics about this, click that like button, follow, subscribe. We're a turn on design.

speaker-0: And just remember that the goal is not to just maximize the size, but it's to maximize the true function and the livability. And that is how you're going to maximize your investments and your return on design. So check us out on our website, audaciousdesigns.design and follow us on our socials at realreturnondesign for more value add content. Thanks for listening.

speaker-1: See you next time.