There is always a pause.
I will be on the phone with someone lovely, someone who has thought carefully about her house for two years, and I will say a number out loud.
Then there will be a silence long enough that I start wondering whether the call dropped.
It has not dropped.
She is just doing math.
The question I get more than any other question, and I mean by a mile, is:
How much does it cost?
And I have been avoiding this one publicly because the real numbers are almost always higher than people expect, and I do not particularly enjoy being the person who ruins everyone’s day.
But you keep asking.
So here is the long version, with all the numbers I could not fit into a few minutes on Instagram.
More importantly, here is how I want you to think about them, because knowing what my house costs you is not actually very helpful.
Knowing how to figure out what your house will cost is.
The two numbers everyone wants
In my world, working on luxury projects and old houses, new construction runs around $600 per square foot.
A full luxury renovation can land around $400 per square foot.
Before anyone screenshots those numbers and opens Excel, I need to put a very large asterisk next to both of them. These figures are useful benchmarks from the kind of work we do, not formulas. Project size matters. Scope matters. Existing conditions matter. And economies of scale are very real.
A larger project does not necessarily carry the same cost per square foot as a smaller one. Cost per square foot is shorthand. It is not a bid.
Moreover, two people can tell you they are building a “$600-per-square-foot house” while including completely different things in that number. Before comparing anyone’s cost per square foot, ask what is actually included: construction scope, cabinetry, appliances, decorative lighting, design and architecture fees, site work, landscaping, and so on.
The number is only useful once you know what is inside it.
And “renovation” is doing an enormous amount of work in that second sentence.
When I say $400 per square foot, I am talking about a complete reimagining: walls moving, systems being replaced, rooms changing functions, cabinetry being built, and the plan itself being reconsidered.
If you are refinishing floors, painting, replacing lighting, and updating a bathroom without touching the footprint, you can land well below that. Plenty of beautiful renovations do.
The number climbs as the scope becomes more complicated.
And here is the part people don’t expect: renovation is usually less predictable than new construction.
New construction is expensive, certainly, but it is comparatively knowable. You are building something that does not exist yet on a site you can survey from a drawing set you can price.
Renovating a hundred-year-old house means opening a wall and finding out what several generations of homeowners decided to do back there.
Sometimes it is fine.
Sometimes it is… creative.
That is not a materials problem. It is a discovery problem.
And discovery is difficult to price before you discover it.
Before we talk about materials, this is how you build a budget
This is the part I wish more homeowners understood before they started shopping.
Your renovation budget should not begin with a countertop.
It should begin with scope.
What are you actually doing to the house?
Then you make a complete list of everything that scope requires. Then you determine how much of each thing you need. Then you put realistic pricing against those quantities. Then you add the people required to install it, the cost of getting it there, and money for the things you cannot know yet.
That sounds extremely obvious when I write it down.
And yet this is not how most people renovate.
Most people begin with things they can see.
The range. The backsplash. The wallpaper. The light fixture they saved three years ago and have been emotionally committed to ever since.
Meanwhile, nobody has priced the thirty-seven less exciting things required to make those things work.
That is usually where the budget begins to drift.
So as you read the prices below, I do not want you thinking, Would I spend that much on a faucet?
I want you thinking:
Look at the range inside a single category.
Because that is what you are actually budgeting.
The line item with the swing
A huge portion of any construction budget is labor.
Electricians. Plumbers. Carpenters. Plasterers. Tile setters. Painters. All the people required to make the pretty things actually work.
Labor is one place I do not want you getting particularly creative with the budget. Not because every expensive contractor is excellent or because tradespeople are somehow immune from comparison shopping.
Because the failure mode is expensive.
A material you regret is a material you can live with or eventually replace.
Poor installation usually has to be undone first.
And undoing is where the money goes.
Beautiful materials in the wrong hands are a very expensive lesson, and I have watched people learn it more than once. Materials, however?
Materials are where the range gets enormous.
Stone
Iceberg Extra quartzite is the whitest, rarest Iceberg they pull out of the mountain.
I have seen it retail around $320 per square foot, putting a large slab somewhere around $22,000.
One slab. Before fabrication. Before the edge detail. Before installation.
And before you discover that the island you carefully calculated at one slab actually needs two because cutting directly through the best part of the veining would be a small personal tragedy.
Stone is sold by the slab, not by the exact rectangle you need.
That matters.
On the other end, I have seen Bianco Carrara around $30 per square foot, putting a similarly sized slab at roughly $2,000.
Both are natural stone. Both can be beautiful. One can cost ten times the other.
This is also why I hesitate to say a stone “costs” a specific amount. The same quartzite can price differently from one stone yard to another depending on the block, the container, the quality, the availability, and the individual slab.
Two pieces of stone with the same name are not necessarily the same stone.
What I want you to take from this: do not create your countertop allowance by Googling the square-foot price of one material and multiplying it by your counter area.
Price the actual slabs you need, plus expected waste, fabrication, edge details, delivery, and installation.
That is your stone number.
Wallcoverings
We use a lot of Phillip Jeffries and Schumacher.
A dining room I did in Schumacher’s Les Oiseaux mural came to roughly $14,000 in material alone.
Once you wander into hand-painted de Gournay or Gracie territory, I am not sure the word “budget” continues to function in the traditional sense.
But I also love Boråstapeter’s Magnolia Garden. That is about $7.10 per square foot, and it can paper an entire dining room for roughly $2,000.
I have used it. I would happily use it again.
More expensive is not automatically better.
Two things worth knowing before you price any wallcovering.
The first is that a lot of what looks like wallpaper is not sold like wallpaper. Magnolia Garden is custom printed to your wall dimensions and sold by the square meter with a three-square-meter minimum. Murals are often sold as panels scaled to a specific wall. In both cases you are buying the room, not rolls you can cut to fit, and the wall has to be measured properly before anyone can quote you.
The second applies to traditional roll goods: ask about the pattern repeat. A large repeat creates more waste, which means two papers with the same apparent square-foot price can cost meaningfully different amounts by the time you order enough material.
Nobody puts “fell in love with an enormous pattern repeat” in the renovation budget.
But perhaps we should.
Plumbing
A Perrin & Rowe Georgian Era bridge kitchen faucet in unlacquered brass runs about $2,900 to $3,300 depending on the dealer.
The Waterworks Henry three-hole gooseneck kitchen faucet lists from $3,885.
The Kohler Edalyn is about $700 depending on the finish, and it is perfectly perfect. The whole collection retails from roughly $600 for the bar faucet up to about $985 for the pull-down.
The right decision is not always the expensive decision.
It is the decision that does what you need it to do, looks right in the room, and deserves the portion of the budget you are assigning to it.
One other note on unlacquered brass, since it is having a very enthusiastic moment: it is a living finish.
It will patina.
It will patina unevenly.
The places your hands touch will change faster than the places they don’t.
That is the point.
If this will make you want to follow your family around with brass polish, please choose another finish. This is useful information to learn before spending $3,000 on the faucet.
Hardware
An Emtek knob can be anywhere from about $14 to $37 depending on the collection.
A leather-wrapped pull from Bosco hardware could run you north of $500.
I have specified both.
Both have been the right answer.
Hardware is one of my favorite places to explain the difference between spending more and spending well.
You do not have to put a $500 pull on every drawer in the house.
In fact, please don’t interpret any of this as a challenge.
A few extraordinary pieces in places you touch constantly can have more impact than expensive hardware everywhere.
You do not experience the linen closet in the upstairs hallway the way you experience the bar you entertain guests in on special occasions.
Spend accordingly.
Lighting
Lighting is where I am personally the most dangerous.
Visual Comfort’s Cabinet Maker’s picture light is $649 for the 24-inch. A 24-inch Ralph Lauren Langley is $1,399.
The Roman and Williams Guild Oscar pendant is $6,785, and Urban Electric has statement pieces well past $30,000 per fixture, so I should probably not be left entirely unsupervised in either place. That doesn’t mean you can’t do well with a 14” Bernard by Amber Lewis, which I have also specified.
A warning while we are here. If you go searching for designer lighting online, you will find a great many sites selling something with the same name at half the price. Those are replicas, not deals. Buy from the maker or an authorized dealer.
The reason lighting runs away from people is that lighting is not one decision.
It is thirty decisions.
Each individual decision feels relatively harmless.
Nobody says, “I destroyed the budget with one chandelier.”
They destroy it with nine sconces.
When you budget lighting, count fixtures first.
Then multiply.
It is considerably less fun, but very clarifying.
Appliances
A 48-inch Wolf dual fuel range can run $16,305 or more depending on configuration and door finish. The last La Cornue Château we ordered landed north of $90,000, which is roughly where you arrive at the largest sizes once color, trim, and configuration are chosen.
And of course there is an enormous world between those numbers: GE, KitchenAid, Wolf, Sub-Zero, Miele, Lacanche, La Cornue, and plenty more.
That is exactly the point.
You are not trying to discover what a range costs. You are trying to decide what kind of range belongs in your project and what portion of the budget it deserves.
Custom appliances also behave more like custom furniture than commodity appliances. That affects price, lead time, and sometimes the kitchen design itself.
If the range is anchoring the kitchen, it needs to be decided early enough that the cabinetry can be designed around it.
Which brings me to the other part people forget:
The price tag is almost never the whole price
You find a tile that costs $8 per square foot and calculate the square footage of your bathroom.
Wonderful.
You have now calculated approximately one part of your tile cost.
There may also be waste, freight, delivery, setting materials, waterproofing, trim pieces and installation, not to mention additional labor if you have chosen a pattern that requires your tile setter to obtain an advanced degree in geometry.
The same thing happens everywhere.
A $22,000 slab is not a $22,000 countertop.
A wallpaper quote is not necessarily an installed-wallpaper quote.
A light fixture still has to arrive safely and be installed.
What has to happen between buying this object and actually using it in my finished house?
Price that too.
One more thing about all these numbers
Almost every material price I have given you is retail, and where I can, I have linked you to the manufacturer so you can check.
That is deliberate. A number you can look up yourself is more useful than a mysterious number you simply have to take my word for.
Stone is the obvious exception because there generally isn’t one universal list price.
You will also notice that a few of these manufacturers, Perrin & Rowe and Emtek and La Cornue among them, will not show you a price at all. Their sites send you to a dealer or a showroom. That is not evasiveness. It is how a lot of this industry is built, and it leads directly to something you should understand before hiring your team:
Does your professional pass on trade pricing?
Some firms purchase at trade and sell at or near retail. Some use fixed or variable markups. Some pass trade pricing through and charge a procurement fee. Some work cost-plus.
There isn’t one universally correct structure.
There should, however, be transparency.
Ask how it works before you sign. Your builder or designer should be able to explain, in plain English, what you pay for materials and how they are compensated.
Because that can change the real cost of the exact same faucet by a meaningful amount.
Now build your number
Please do not spend $90,000 on a range because I told you someone else did.
We specialize in historic homes and luxury projects. Some of these numbers may be completely inappropriate for your project, and spending more does not automatically produce better design.
The whole reason I wanted to show you the absurd range between a $35 knob and a $500 pull is that there is no universal “nice house” price list.
You either hire professionals to make one for you, or you build the list yourself.
Start with the scope. Then make a project takeoff: a complete list of everything the project will require you to select or purchase.
Not just marble and faucets.
Door hardware. Shower drains. Cabinet knobs. Sconces. Tile. Trim. Toilets. Appliances. Flooring. Wallcovering. Grout.
All of it.
Then add quantities and give each category a good, better and best price.
This is where the budget finally becomes useful.
Maybe you discover that you genuinely do not care about a $3,000 faucet, but you have been thinking about one particular stone for three years.
Excellent.
Buy the $600 faucet.
Put the money in the stone.
That is what spending well looks like.
And because I know what a pain it is to put that together, I’m giving you the resource we actually use at my firm inside The Design Office.
The exact project takeoff worksheet we use to think through a project category by category, with space to populate good, better and best pricing so you can see where your own budget lands (depending on materials) before you start ordering things.
It is one of many downloadable tools I’m sharing in the course, because I don’t want to simply tell you to “make a budget” or “stay organized.” I want to hand you the actual tools that help you do it.
And once you have the takeoff, the question changes.
You stop asking:
What does a renovation cost?
And start asking:
Where do I want mine to land?
That is a much better question.
Because a wrong faucet is usually a contained mistake.
A wrong kitchen plan is a multiplying one.
The truly expensive mistakes happen when the decisions are made in the wrong order, when cabinetry is ordered before the plan is settled, selections are made for rooms that later move, or something gets designed around a condition nobody confirmed.
That is really what I care about teaching.
Not how to spend the most.
How to know where to spend, what to decide, and when to decide it, so ideally, you only have to pay for it once.
Enrollment for The Design Office opens September 28. Join the waitlist today by clicking HERE.