Stay With Us, Please? My Quest to Design a Better Guest Room Than the In-Laws
Determined to persuade her married daughters to visit—and lacking her rivals’ in-ground pool—our columnist decided to up her guest-room game. Here, her tips.
Determined to persuade her married daughters to visit—and lacking her rivals’ in-ground pool—our columnist decided to up her guest-room game. Here, her tips.
I SUSPECT that most people’s so-called guest bedrooms are, like mine, giant closets. Once upon a time they were my daughters’ bedrooms. But after my kids grew up, their childhood rooms were almost immediately pressed into service as warehouse space.
My husband’s guitar amps? Store them in a spare room. Amazon packages to be returned? Guest room. These rooms also collect castoffs I’m not emotionally ready to part with, including 10-foot drapery panels with a songbird pattern I made with a sewing machine my husband magnanimously gave me on our 10th anniversary. I think I used the machine once, and if I ever need it, it’s in a corner of the guest room.
This situation is counterproductive for someone like me, hoping to lure home “guests” like my three adult children and their husbands and partners. So I recently resolved to fix the guest-room issue—and immediately realised this was a job for a professional.
“My problem is that now that my children are paired-off they have other options—in-laws with better guest rooms—who they could visit instead,” I said to Grey Joyner, an interior designer in Wilson, N.C. These rival accommodations include an enviable guest suite (I’ve slept there comfortably myself), with extremely high-thread-count sheets, a private bathroom and terrace access to a landscaped garden with an in-ground swimming pool. “Of course, I’m not trying to compete head-to-head against the in-laws,” I hedged.
“Of course you are competing with the in-laws—as you should!” Joyner said. “If you were my client, this is when I would tell you: Every room needs to tell a story.”
“‘High-end hotel’ is a nice story for a room,” I said. “Should I toss everything and start from scratch?”
“No!” Joyner said. “This is not a hotel, it’s your home, and it has to feel personal. I would create a story around things you collect or already have.”
I considered what our story might be. “A thriller about a hoarder with a songbird-drapes fetish?” I asked.
She ignored this.
Obviously, accessories designed to lure each of my daughters would be nice to have, including a luggage rack for the “heavy packer” in the family (Joyner likes the $225 foldable, faux-bamboo versions from One of a Find in Charleston, S.C.); wall-mounted reading sconces for my “low-brow-murder-mystery addict” middle child (my go-to is the bendable-arm gooseneck wall sconces from Etsy sellerDLIGHT); and perhaps a Sonos speaker for the family’s “promising-new-artists scout.”
“Maybe it’s the Southerner in me, but I have a ton of silver pieces,” Joyner said. “I might put a tray on a dresser for jewellery, and one in the bathroom as a soap dish. Guests say, ‘I love that dish,’ and I say, ‘That was my grandmother’s.’ Now it has a story.”
A plan took shape: First, I spent a few days painting a Louis-XVI-style caned bed with three coats of a rich, deep brown colour—Farrow & Ball’s Mahogany—so it would have a strong visual presence to anchor the room. Second, I painted the walls, to cover the pale Benjamin Moore Ballet White with Farrow & Ball Smoked Trout, a hue whose name got a rise out of my husband. “Wow, $150 a gallon for paint?” he said. “Is it made with real trout?”
The colour created a woodsy-tan backdrop against which a castoff pair of cloudy-mirror-top night tables suddenly looked glamorous.
What next? Window coverings, perhaps in a joyous songbird pattern? Or maybe not.
“You need blackout shades or drapes because you want your guests to get a good night’s sleep,” said Kelly Simpson, senior director of design and innovation at Budget Blinds, an Irvine, Calif., company with 900 franchises nationwide. “For your situation, personally I’d do a layered look, blackout shade with drapery panels on the sides. Adding draperies softens a room.”
Stephanie Moffitt, design director of the Mokum collection at James Dunlop Textiles in Australia, concurred, suggesting patterned fabrics on shades and drapes. “You can take more risk with bolder palettes” than in a main bedroom where you have to sleep (and look at the curtains) every night for years, she said.
Luring adult children to come home could get expensive. Does it need to?
I turned to psychologist Joshua Coleman’s “Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict” (Harmony, 2021) for answers. But after skimming the free-on-Amazon excerpt of the book, I still had questions—so I phoned the author.
“I’m actually trying to prevent estrangement with adult children before it happens,” I told him. “The first pages of your book point out that they—and by extension, their spouses—aren’t obligated to spend more time than they want with their parents,” I said. “Can I convey that I respect that through how I decorate a guest room?”
“Probably not—and keep in mind there’s a risk that they don’t want you to update their rooms and will feel displaced by it,” Coleman said.
“But their spouses don’t want to look at their old prom photos,” I said.
“You said you have daughters?” he asked.
Three, I confirmed.
“Daughters tend to be more powerful arbiters of time spent with parents than sons, so I would be more conscious of displeasing them. Husbands will fall in line.”
Really? It was the reactions of the spouses and partners I’d been fearing—all three of my daughters had given a thumbs-up to more-comfortable décor and had in fact unanimously suggested a mattress upgrade (the old one dated to 1985).
“So no expensive furnishings are necessary?” I asked.
He could hear my disappointment. “Look, if you want to justify it to your husband, you can say you talked to a national expert and he said you absolutely need to buy nice furniture,” he said.
That faux bamboo luggage rack will soon be mine.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.