Home Buyers Get Ahead of Supply-Chain Issues by Purchasing the House and Everything Inside
One couple in California paid $30,000 for all of the seller’s furniture so they wouldn’t have to ‘sit in an empty house’
6 min
Last year, Gerardo and Rita Luna upgraded from their roughly 2,700-square-foot home in Oxnard, Calif., to a much larger house in nearby Santa Paula, paying $2.4 million. The couple, who own four automotive repair facilities, said they had been looking for a quieter place, where they wouldn’t be able to “shake their neighbors’ hands through the window,” Mr. Luna said. The Santa Paula estate, on 6 acres, fit the bill perfectly.
The only problem: how could they possibly furnish such a large property? They didn’t have nearly enough furniture to fill the nearly 7,000-square-foot house, and what they did have didn’t fit the French Country style of their new home. Plus, they knew that global supply-chain issues would likely make buying new furniture difficult and time-consuming. Instead, Mr. Luna proposed an unusual solution: They offered to buy all of the seller’s furniture, although the heavy draperies and plaid upholstery didn’t exactly fit their taste.
“We knew that it would take us perhaps years to fill the house with furniture,” said Mr. Luna, 45. “So, even though it didn’t totally fit our vibe, we felt it made sense. We didn’t want to sit in an empty house.”
The seller was downsizing to a new home nearby and agreed to sell her furniture to the Lunas for about $30,000, “pennies on the dollar,” compared with the original prices, said the Lunas’ real-estate agent, Victoria Adam of LIV Sotheby’s International Realty.
It’s a good thing she did. A new dining table the Lunas ordered for the house took six months to arrive, while a new sofa took three. “In the meantime, we had a sofa to sit on,” Mr. Luna said.
In the past, it was common for properties in second-home or resort communities to be sold with the furniture included, but primary homes were traditionally delivered empty. Since the onset of the pandemic, however, more home buyers are making offers to purchase properties fully furnished, real-estate agents said. With supply-chain delays and other logistical issues leaving buyers waiting months or even years for their new furniture, agents said, purchasing the sellers’ furniture is much more appealing than it used to be.
Developer Rick Rosemarin said he encountered this desperation firsthand last year, when he was trying to sell a roughly $10 million estate he built in Greenwich, Conn. It turned out that one would-be buyer who toured the modern estate was just trolling for furniture. The buyer said the house wasn’t for him, but asked if he could purchase all the furniture for another home he was buying. “That was hysterical,” said Mr. Rosemarin, 37.
While Mr. Rosemarin wouldn’t part with the furniture—it took him close to a year to furnish the house with supply-chain delays—he said didn’t blame the man. “The time frame for some of these deliveries was a joke,” Mr. Rosemarin said. “To this day, we still have a table we ordered in 2021 that hasn’t been delivered.”
When he did sell the property in December 2022, the buyers—a family from overseas—wanted most of the furniture, and paid a premium for it, Mr. Rosemarin said, although he declined to say how much. “They initially wanted to order their own for a few rooms, but when they found out from their interior designer how long it would take, they ended up buying more from us.”
Buyers are also increasingly asking to purchase the rental furniture that many owners use to “stage” their homes for sale. Home-stager Robert Sablic of Quadra said his company recently furnished a four-bedroom apartment asking $45 million at Manhattan’s One57 condominium. “Shark Tank” star Robert Herjavec made an offer to buy the condo for $34.5 million, but only if the rental furniture was included.
Such instances used to be unusual, Mr. Sablic said, since high-end buyers often preferred to have all new furniture rather than used pieces that had been shifted from place to place by the staging company. They also present a challenge for stagers, who want to keep their clients happy but also have to quickly re-source and purchase new items for their own inventory, while dealing with supply-chain issues themselves.
Andrew Bowen, partner at ASH Staging, said as a result of the surge in demand, his company recently started renting staged furniture to buyers for a year, so that they could have a place to sit and sleep while waiting for their own items to arrive.
Other buyers, however, simply fall in love with the sellers’ furniture.
Last year, real-estate agent Joan Herlong made a deal to sell a house in suburban Simpsonville, S.C., for about $9 million, a record for the area. The only glitch: the buyers loved the sellers’ eclectic, colorful furniture, which wasn’t for sale. The sellers planned to take everything with them to a new home they were building in nearby Greenville.
Once the deal was in contract, the buyers convinced the sellers to part with their furniture, Ms. Herlong said. She said she doesn’t know how much they paid for the furniture, but believes it could have been a seven-figure sum. Thinking it might be fun to “order all new stuff,” the sellers moved out with only a few suitcases, she said, leaving nearly their whole lives behind.
“Sometimes people don’t want to just buy your house, they want to buy your whole lifestyle,” Ms. Herlong said. The sellers did, however, draw the line when the buyer wanted their pet cows, too. “I’m not a cattle broker,” Ms. Herlong quipped.
When New York City media executive Andy Plesser, 71, started hunting for a weekend home in Connecticut’s Litchfield County, he wasn’t planning on buying a fully furnished house. But when he saw the home of Eric and Liz Macaire, he fell for their furnishings.
Mr. Macaire, 60, a restaurateur, and Ms. Macaire, a 54-year-old interior designer, had curated the home with items such as a set of 1940s bowling benches, a yellow settee that once belonged to Ms. Macaire’s socialite aunt, and an antique dough maker from a Paris flea market. There was also a pair of 19th century English “half moon” tables, an antique gold-framed beveled mirror and a cubist painting above the fireplace. “They were things that couldn’t easily be replicated or replaced,” said Mr. Plesser. He bought the house in November 2022 for $1.25 million, and made an unsolicited offer to buy all the furniture.
The Macaires were amenable to selling everything but a few sentimental items for $17,000, said Lenore Mallett of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, a real-estate agent who worked on the deal. They were downsizing anyway, Mr. Macaire said, and some of the pieces would have been challenging to move. “It’s a compliment that people want the pieces we chose,” Mr. Macaire said.
While he didn’t buy the furniture for convenience so much as admiration for the sellers’ tastes, Mr. Plesser said it was also nice to have the pieces in place immediately, rather than waiting for new furniture to be delivered.
Dallas real-estate agent Cindi Caudle of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty sold a roughly $2 million, two-bedroom pied-à-terre last year at the HALL Arts Residences condominium. The buyer, from California, wanted all the staged furniture, including small details like the Hermès blankets and decorative bowls on the countertop. When the deal closed, Ms. Caudle said she removed what she thought were throwaway staging items, including plastic lemons from a wooden bowl; they hadn’t used real lemons to avoid them going bad. When the buyer arrived in his new home, however, he quickly called Ms. Caudle to ask that the lemons be returned.
“I thought I was doing him a favour, that he wouldn’t want those nasty things,” she said. Instead, “I felt like the lemon thief. The lemon thief who came in the middle of the night.”
Sometimes, disputes over furniture and other add-ons can threaten to derail a deal. Greenwich real-estate agent Amanda Miller of Houlihan Lawrence said she almost had a multimillion-dollar deal fall through over a dispute about outdoor furniture cushions. “It can be the couch that breaks the deal, sometimes,” she said. To avoid these kinds of snafus, agents recommend sealing the deal for a property first, then turning to negotiations over furniture.
“Sometimes, folks can get emotional and stuck over stupid things, like a bureau or something,” said Evelyn Tilney of Kienlen Lattmann Sotheby’s International Realty in New Jersey. “I like to keep them separate so that if the furniture falls through, it doesn’t jam up the whole deal.”
Agents said they also recommend a separate bill of sale for the furniture, since mortgage lenders don’t want to have to determine the value of the furniture for the purposes of financing.
Ms. Herlong said she once had an eccentric buyer make an offer contingent on the seller parting with his two dogs. The lender’s appraiser wanted to charge extra for researching the resale market for Jack Russell terriers.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
A long-standing cultural cruise and a new expedition-style offering will soon operate side by side in French Polynesia.
The pandemic-fuelled love affair with casual footwear is fading, with Bank of America warning the downturn shows no sign of easing.
Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.
5 min
James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.
The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.
Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.
The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.
But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.
Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.
New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”
Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.
And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”
Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.
“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.
From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.
Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.
Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.
In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.
A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.
“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.
Screen-Free ‘Escapes’
“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”
Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.
Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.
“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”
A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.
Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.
Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.
“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.
As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.
“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”
Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.
The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.
When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”
Analog Accessories
Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?
“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.
Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”
More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.
For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.
Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.
Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.
“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.
In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.
Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.
The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.
Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.
The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”
From mud baths to herbal massages, Fiji’s heat rituals turned one winter escape into a soul-deep reset.
By improving sluggish performance or replacing a broken screen, you can make your old iPhone feel new agai
