In his 1983 “mockumentary” film Zelig, Woody Allen plays Leonard Zelig who, out of his desire to fit in and be liked, takes on the appearance and characteristics of the personalities around him. He would seamlessly blend into dozens of vintage film scenes featuring the likes of folks from Charlie Chaplin to Charles Lindberg, eventually gaining international fame as the “human chameleon.” While the 2019 BUILDER KB Home ProjeKt design team didn’t actually get its inspiration from this movie, the concept home will have the unique ability to seamlessly adapt to the changing characteristics of its residents.
One of the overriding desires of the ProjeKt team was to provide for the total wellness of the residents by incorporating universal design, which started with a true understanding of the target buyer demographic. The KB Home ProjeKt will be located in the Inspirada Community in Henderson, Nevada, where most buyers are young families. The ProjeKt, Where Tomorrow Lives, not only needs to reflect the way we might live in 10 to 15 years, but it also needs to appeal to younger buyers.
Universal for Today and Tomorrow
With those considerations in mind, the home features a generous master suite, den and great room on the first floor and two additional bedrooms and a game room upstairs. While the design team wanted to right-size the home, the team also had a desire to provide the capability for the owner to expand the spaces to accommodate a variety of entertainment options. Some of the options include collapsing exterior glass walls that allow the great room to expand outdoors as typically found in desert living and a unique feature in the den, a moving wall that, with a click of a button, can push back into the den itself to expand the interior entertaining space. This flexibility in its program permits the ground floor to be reduced by 150 square feet, in turn increasing the outdoor open space and, at the same time, reducing the home’s carbon footprint.
But the design team wanted to go beyond just creating a flexible starter home, it wanted to create a home that the owners could live in for half a century if they so desired. The team went through dozens of narratives of who other potential buyers might be and of the various needs that might change for the residents over the years including move-up buyers and empty-nesters.
Scenario One: Boomerang Child
One of the scenarios that the team designed the ProjeKt home to respond to is a boomerang kid returning home who just joined the workforce and can’t afford market-rate rent, or is simply saving for a down payment on a home of their own. From a discreet half flight of exterior stairs, a second entry can be added to the home that creates an exclusive access to the upper floor. The bar that was designed for the game room can become a second kitchen and, coupled with the washer and dryer upstairs, the space essentially becomes a separate apartment.
Scenario Two: Rental Unit
After the boomerang child finally flies off, the space has additional functionality. It can remain a private secondary space that can be closed off and leased as a rental unit to help supplement the home owner’s nest egg as a long-term rental or day-to-day home-rental services like Airbnb, which has become very popular for millennials as well as business travelers and everyone in between. Last year, Airbnb had $2.6 billion in revenue.
Scenario Three: Live In Help
Another option is that parents of the adult children can stay in one of the bedrooms upstairs and provide live in assistance to this young family or the older parents can be on the ground floor and the young family can all be together on the second level in a separate apartment with an exterior entrance or in the undivided home. In 2016, a record 64 million people, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, lived with multiple generations under one roof, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data. According to a 2016 survey by John Burns Real Estate Consulting, 44 percent of home shoppers in a group of 20,000 hoped to accommodate their elderly parents, and 42 percent planned to accommodate their adult children.
Scenario Four: Caregiver Quarters
With the KB Home ProjeKt having everything its owner would need on the first floor, other life stages were considered by the design team. Of all the people who have Alzheimer's disease, about five percent develop symptoms before age 65, so if four million Americans have Alzheimer's, at least 200,000 people have the early-onset form of the disease. Most people with early-onset Alzheimer's develop symptoms of the disease in their 40s and 50s, so there could be a potential need for a caregiver. The access door at the stair that was closed off to secure the separation and privacy of the rental flat can now serve the purpose of providing privacy for the caregiver living upstairs when required, but also provide access to the owner’s floor when needed.
While the initial brainstorming of what lifestyle changes and needs the initial young family-owner might have over the decades, the corollary of these scenarios was to create a concept home that would appeal to a broader spectrum of home buyers, from the baby boomers to the echo boomers. It took a very collaborative design approach to make it happen. Here, I give additional insight into the process that drove this design innovation.
As the home building industry will see in February at Inspirada, this concept home is designed to leave the owner with no regrets at all since it is actually able to become something else. Watch the home design progress to deliver functionality to any buyer at www.builderonline.com/kbhomeprojekt.
