What we want in our next home: Everything and not too much

Four tips from a CEO building his own house:

Richard Dugas, chief executive and chairman of PulteGroup, one of the nation’s biggest home builders, moved the company to Buckhead recently and hired a contractor to build a home for himself and his wife. Here’s what Dugas said he’s learned in the process:

— One of the most crucial decisions is starting with the right location. (He picked a spot in Brookhaven, tore down an existing home and started building a new one.)

— Consider traffic. Dugas wanted to be no more than a 15-minute drive from work. “That was my tolerance level for pain.”

— Be as clear and detailed as possible early on with your designer/architect.

— Think with the future in mind. (Dugas, 50, planned a master bedroom on the first floor: “I didn’t want to be dealing with stairs 25 years from now.”)

Dugas on Atlanta’s continuing evolution:

— Expect a lot more urban building in the city of Atlanta, including more homes attached to each other rather than sitting on their own lots.

— Home buying trends evolve slowly, so a significant portion of PulteGroup’s local construction will continue to be suburban.

— “I personally don’t think Atlanta can solve its transportation issues without transit,” he said. The metro area offers a good quality of life, “with the exception of traffic.”

Clues to America’s evolving tastes and home lives are being studied these days in a Norcross warehouse near I-85.

That’s where I was recently, with executives of one of the nation’s largest home builders, when a gaggle of focus group participants passed us with their clipboards.

I was informed that they were TCG 9’s. That’s Target Consumer Group 9: fairly affluent people 55 and older who don’t want a neighborhood that handholds them with activities.

PulteGroup has 11 TCGs in all, reducing us to demographics like young family and urban couple. CEO Richard Dugas tells me they’ve concluded that it’s our membership in these groups – more than whether we happen to live in Chicago or Phoenix or Atlanta — that shapes our housing desires.

The focus group participants are being paid to tell the company what we Americans want in our next homes.

More than 1,000 metro Atlantans will have gone through the exercise this year alone for PulteGroup, which last year moved its headquarters to from Detroit to Atlanta’s Buckhead.

Figuring out what home buyers want is no longer largely a gut call for some home builders and their architects, at least for those who want to come out of the latest brutal downturn smarter than when they went in.

Dining room or bigger eat-in kitchen? Space for an elevator or just a closet? Sink in the kitchen island or no?

Cardboard refrigerators

In the Norcross warehouse we navigate a makeshift version of a floor plan with fabric walls, pictures of windows and fireplaces, cardboard refrigerators, plywood kitchen islands and explanatory signs like “pantry extras that add character.”

The focus group participants’ reactions are captured on video. Pulte specialists hover nearby to take notes.

And based on my tag-along with the group and chats with PulteGroup leaders, here’s what our wants boil down to: whatever makes the next house comfortable, flexible, efficient, suited to changing needs and – this is big — not a square foot of space more.

We need a garage. We’ve soured on formal dining rooms. We want to see green space.

We like open floor plans and love opening the front door and seeing straight through the house and out big back windows and glass doors. We lust for more storage and bigger closets.

And we want a dramatic kitchen with a big center island. Even in a starter house. “Opulent” kitchens, in fact, an executive told me. Which I take as a sign that, even if we eschew unneeded space, the recession didn’t quench our desire for high-end finishes.

In one focus group, a woman saw the three steps it would take to get from the mock kitchen stove to the microwave in a butler pantry and advised that that was too far.

“If I’m frying an egg then I have to run over there to get my bacon,” she pointed out.

Another worried about a wall separating the living room and the master bedroom. Better have extra insulation, she said, because not everybody turns in for the night at the same time.

Call these first-world problems if you want, but we have standards.

We take more time to shop for homes compared to before the recession. And there’s been a sharp fall in the percentage of people who say they bought primarily to get a bigger house, according to the National Association of Realtors.

So much for keeping up with the Trumps.

Thawing from the freeze

Home building has partially recovered from the recession’s deep freeze, but it’s still far from off its former wildfire pace through metro Atlanta.

Older Americans – empty nesters, retirees and the like – are worried about outliving their money, so they are being especially careful about what and when they buy. At the other end, millennials are putting off marriage and babies, dealing with tight finances and, generally, delaying home buying for a decade, I was told by Dugas. (But he says 80 percent of them still say they want to buy a home.)

He’s betting his team’s extra effort to incorporate our opinions will pay off with more model homes that attract buyers.

If the floor plans get tweaks and pass muster with focus groups, they could be made into thousands of the company’s homes in the months ahead.