Outdoor Home Renovations on the Rise this Year; Homeowners also Willing to Spend More

SEATTLE, June 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- More than two-thirds (68 percent) of remodelers are planning outdoor home improvement projects this season, a 70 percent increase compared to last summer (40 percent), according to the summer Zillow® Digs® Home Design Trend Reportⁱ. Open-air living rooms, featuring wood arbors, fully upholstered seating and muted colors, will be popular with homeowners this season.

This one-of-a-kind trend report depends on a survey of members of the Zillow Digs Board of Designers, a group of design experts from across the country, and the most popular outdoor photos on Zillow Digs, a hub for home improvement and design inspiration.   

Summer remodel budgets increased since the beginning of the year, up 100 percent to $1000 on median. With a larger budget, many homeowners are considering more extensive outdoor remodels such as open-air living rooms to expand useable square footage for year-round use, adding value to their home.

Top three trends for open-air living rooms:

Wood arbors: Wood arbors will be all the rage this summer with homeowners wanting a clearly defined outdoor space that functions as a second living room. Expect to see "arbors featuring lots of greenery" to create the illusion of an "open-air ceiling," says Melissa Klebanoff of Melissa Klebanoff Interior Design in Seattle. Wood arbors with white curtains and outdoor twinkle lights also will be popular this season.

Fully upholstered couches: Zillow design experts identified fully upholstered couches as a growing open-air living room trend as homeowners want to invest in "comfortable seating and lounging pieces for a real indoor/outdoor feel," says Mara Miller of Carrier and Company in New York City. In addition to indoor-style seating, other typically interior accessories such as rugs, lamps and wood coffee tables also will gain popularity among remodelers.

Muted colors: Homeowners and designers identify soft, muted hues as the most popular colors for open-air living rooms. Outdoor colors this season are about "subtly not saturation," says Marc Thee of Marc-Michaels Interior Design in Winter Park, Florida. Expect to see homeowners "dialing back" those louder accent colors from last summer such as "turquoise to sea glass, watermelon to a greyed shrimp and bright orange to a beautiful sherbet," Thee says.

Zillow Digs is a hub for home improvement and design inspiration, where users can browse more than one million photos of interiors and exteriors of real homes, organized by space, style, cost and color. Patent-pending Digs Estimates help people understand what it would cost in their geographic location to recreate the actual bathrooms and kitchens they are viewing. In addition, Zillow Digs users can collect images, share favorites and follow others for inspiration, from the Zillow Digs App for iPhone® and iPad® or on the Web.

About Zillow, Inc.

Zillow, Inc. (NASDAQ:Z) operates the leading real estate and home-related information marketplaces on mobile and the Web, with a complementary portfolio of brands and products that help people find vital information about homes, and connect with the best local professionals. Zillow's brands serve the full lifecycle of owning and living in a home: buying, selling, renting, financing, remodeling and more. In addition, Zillow offers a suite of tools and services to help local real estate, mortgage, rental and home improvement professionals manage and market their businesses. Welcoming nearly 81.5 million unique users during its peak month in 2014, the Zillow, Inc. portfolio includes Zillow.com®, Zillow Mobile, Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, Zillow Rentals, Zillow Digs®, Postlets®, Diverse Solutions®, Agentfolio®, Mortech®, HotPads™ and StreetEasy®. The company is headquartered in Seattle.

Zillow.com, Zillow, Postlets, Mortech, Diverse Solutions, StreetEasy, Agentfolio and Digs are registered trademarks of Zillow, Inc.

HotPads is a trademark of Zillow, Inc.

iPhone and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc.

ⁱ These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted May 19-20, 2014. For the survey, a nationally representative sample of 2,023 randomly selected adults aged 18 and older residing in the United States was interviewed via Ipsos' U.S. online omnibus. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate within +/-2.2 percentage points 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire population of adults in the United States been polled. The margin of error will be larger within sub-groupings of the survey population. The sub-group of homeowners in the sample is 1,364, which has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points. These data were weighted to ensure the sample's regional and age/gender composition reflects that of the actual U.S. population according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140613/117725

SOURCE Zillow, Inc.