Next to the cost of the house itself, the single biggest family expense for many middle-and upper-class Americans is the furniture and decoration that go to make the house a home. Nor is it any longer a once-in-a-life-time investment. "Forty years ago, you furnished a home and were done with it," notes Robert Lauter, vice president of Manhattan's R. H. Macy Co. Today, one out of five families changes residence every year, and it is a common pattern for a married couple to start off in a small apartment, move to the suburbs when the children arrive, shift from suburb to suburb as income rises, and then move back into the city after the children are grown—decorating and redecorating all along the way. Let there be a divorce, and the master bedroom, if not the whole house, is sure to be redone by the remaining partner. And even without such upheavals, Americans think of change as a form of therapy. "People can afford to be bored," says Dallas Decorator Howard Goldman. "They can now tire of things they couldn't afford to tire of in less affluent times."
The more Americans decorate, the better they decorate, and the more they rely on some form of professional guidance. Rare is the department store, nowadays, that doesn't offer essentially free decorating service as a sales come-on. In Detroit, J. L. Hudson has a staff of 58 full-time decorators; Rich's in Atlanta employs 30. Manhattan's Bloomingdale's advised 1,500 customers last year, more than twice the number five years ago. The store's designers visit the homes to be decorated, draw up floor plans and supply all the furnishings, even if some of them must be obtained elsewhere. To discourage freeloaders from taking advantage of the advice and then buying everything from another source, some stores charge an initial $50 consultation fee, which is credited against future purchase.
End of the Period. Another way of decorating is through the "ten-percenter," often a dilettante who, with no formal design training and as little as two years of experience working with a decorator, obtains a wholesale discount card and works for 10% of what the customer intends to spend. To the dismay of reputable professional decorators, who usually take the entire 30% to 40% retail markup as their fee, "ten-percenters" are overrunning the field. "You have to stand in line at the fabric houses because of them," sighs one San Francisco decorator.
For decorators and clients alike, the most important part of the entire undertaking is the in-depth interviewing at the very outset. Do the members of the family live formally or informally? Do they favor buffet suppers or sit-down dinners? Do they play bridge? Are they hi-fi buffs? Do they have young children or teenagers? What are their hobbies? Working with a decorator is thus something like going to a psychiatrist, only more expensive: name decorators reckon on spending at least $10,000 for each room and a minimum of $50,000 for an entire house.