Mycle Gorman thinks he knows you better than you know yourself.
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What will entice you in the boudoir? Send you swooning in the sunroom. Get the juices flowing in the kitchen.
He does it with luxe fabric, fine wood and colors as cool as Plantation Beige and as hot as Roasted Pepper. He fills picture frames with smiling faces and tosses pillows, dripping eyelash fringe, everywhere. By the stove, he sets a faux cherry pie and, in the bedroom closet, a pair of plush slippers.
Part decorator, part dream weaver, Gorman is the Merlin of model homes. His trick is to put three little words in your mouth: “I’ll buy it.”
With farmland disappearing under developments as hard to tell apart as cornfields, builders are relying as never before on their model homes to lure clients to the settlement table. They are pouring truckloads of money ($100,000 isn’t unusual) into interior design–to make an uninhabited house look like the home of successful people with superb taste.
Such as you.
Even the tiniest details–the way the shower curtain is tied back, the magazines on the coffee table–can help clinch a sale.
“If it wasn’t crucial, you wouldn’t find all these intelligent, experienced builders spending a fortune to decorate these models,” said developer Joe Duckworth, who put $160,000 worth of extravagances, from marble floors to a refrigerated wine rack, into a $1 million model that was built in Lower Moreland Township, Pa.
“It’s all about imagery. It’s not about keeping the rain out.”
Thousands upon thousands of homes will sprout across suburbia this year. To land-use activists, that’s sprawl. To interior designers such as Gorman, it’s boom time.
“Decorating” is what builders used to have their wives do to model homes. “Merchandising,” on the other hand, is well beyond the realm of the dabbler, said Kay Green, a nationally known designer from Winter Park, Fla. It can involve moving walls, changing entrances and even adding rooms.
“It requires someone who understands what motivates people to buy,” she said. “Even if you don’t want (a house), you’ll want one” of these.
Few have more of a knack than Mycle Gorman, 40, who last year worked on more than 70 models. “`The buyer is so sophisticated now, thanks to good ol’ Martha Stewart,” said Gorman, whose business, Design Works, is based in Point Pleasant, Pa.
In the Philadelphia-area market, he says, clients typically want hardwood floors, and master bedrooms that are designed as retreats. They want ceramic-tile splashboards in the kitchen, and floor-to-ceiling stone fireplaces in the family room.
His job, he said, is to “perfect” their ideas. That can be arduous.
More than a year ago, Gorman sat down with builder Peter Rotelle to conjure a vision of a model home that would turn browsers into buyers at Martin’s Farm in North Coventry, Chester County.
Rotelle had given him only a profile of a buyer he was expected to attract: a couple 30 to 40, a husband in middle management and the wife staying at home or working in retailing. They would have two children, a daughter in 11th grade and a son in eighth grade. They would be buying their second home.
“These are people who are going to start showing off what they’ve gained in life,” said Billy Wurtenberg, Gorman’s marketing director.
With scraps of upholstery, wallpaper and Formica laid out on a story board, Gorman went to work to hook “the fictional family.”
He talked Rotelle into replacing a large closet off the master bedroom with a small study, and insisted that a sunroom be built onto the kitchen– “the perfect haven for Mom to have the morning coffee and watch Rosie O’Donnell when the kids are gone,” he explained.
Eight months later Gorman was putting on the finishing touches.
He had bathed the living and dining rooms in neutral colors that “wouldn’t be dated within months.”
Stocking-footed on the newly installed off-white carpeting, Gorman leaned precariously over a stairwell to hang a picture of a Greek urn, while associate Bill Henderson kept a firm grip.
Then he hustled into the master bedroom, moving an artificial plant from a dresser to a nightstand “because you come in and see the nightstand first,” he pointed out.
In the study off the master bedroom, he pulled a few books from the built-in shelves and spread them open on the desk, as if someone had just been there reading.
Meanwhile, Wurtenberg, scissors in hand, flipped through a stack of magazines in search of faces to fill picture frames scattered throughout the house. In some, he put pictures of couples; in others, singles.
“You don’t want to alienate” unmarried customers, he cautioned.
In the boy’s room, Gorman added kneepads and a 12-speed bike to play off a cycling theme in the wallpaper border. At the far end of the hall, the theme was all-girl–a border of kittens, pink paw prints on the ceiling, posters of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys on the walls.
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“Even if the children remember the house more than the parents,” Wurtenberg said, “it’s a plus.”
In the end, Rotelle paid $100,000 to dress up a home selling for $300,000.
It was not wasted on Tina Schmidt.
The 32-year-old resident of Swedesboro, Pa., was house hunting when she wandered into the model at Martin’s Farm. She was not ready to commit but could speak for her daughters, ages 2 and 4.
“Oh, look!” she cooed, pointing to the paw prints on the ceiling. “They’d like this room.”
In the master bedroom, Schmidt was smitten with the study that might have been a closet. But, of course, Gorman knew she would.
“Those are the strikes of emotion we try to trigger,” he said.
Gorman is proud of his work. But could he live in it?
When he was just 13, his mother put him in charge of redecorating the family’s brick row house on Tree Street in South Philadelphia.
The finished product had a Spanish theme, with lots of harvest gold, a bright-orange kitchen sink, a floating staircase and a mirrored wall.
“I love to mix texture and patterns,” said Gorman, who, inspired by a dinner plate, recently redid his summer house in the historic district of Cape May, N.J., in a bow-to-stern nautical theme.
He painted the place red, white and blue, put custom-made galley doors in every entry, and stained the porch planks to look like a ship’s weathered deck.
Do not expect to see anything like it at your nearest development.
“I always say that some of my favorite spaces in models are probably ones I wouldn’t do for myself,” Gorman said. “But when I’m done, I say, `I could live here.’ “