Few reasons to have formal rooms

If you think about it from a practical and financial standpoint there are very few reasons to have formal rooms.  The number one reason?  Because we already have furniture for the room.  A piano, a grand dining room table, a family heirloom.  I understand this concept, and as a designer one of the first things you have to come to peace with is that you are never designing your house.  You are designing their house.  More importantly their home.

That being said, lets just break down the financials of formal rooms.  At this time, most houses under 5000 s.f. wont have a formal living room, so lets just focus on the formal dining. A good size formal dining room will be about 12′ x 15′ interior dimensions.  The equates to 180 square feet.  Lets add in 20 square feet more for wall thickness and brick ledge and that gets our total to 200 square feet.

From what I’m told building prices right now are ranging from $185 / square foot up to $300 / square foot (not including the land).  Therefore, for a formal dining room you are paying $37,000 to $60,000 for that room.  Is it worth it?

Lets say the house is worth $1.2MM without the dining and $1.24MM with the dining.  With basic terms and 5.5% interest the mortgage payment without the dining is $6813.  With the dining $7041.    This equates to about $230 more per month.  Add in the extra AC costs, etc, maybe about $260 per month more.

Just food for thought.

Personally I could easily do without the extra cost, but then again, if everyone needed the same elements  in a home, I would be out of a job.