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Access Mary Cook Associates insights on commercial interior design strategy, trends, and issues that help real estate developers and owners and their clients keep abreast of the buzz in interior design news.
Consumers Want Full Disclosure on Everything. Welcome to the Age of Transparency
The cocoa in the Oreo you ate recently may have come from a farm the size of a football field in rural Ghana, the Wall Street Journal reported this fall. Consumers can learn this because Oreo’s parent company, Mondelez, now publishes data about its cocoa supply...
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What do Millennial Homebuyers Really Want?
The housing market may be cool for now, but there is a huge wave of potential buyers on the horizon that are about to heat things up: aging millennials. In the next 10 years, 44.9 million millennials will turn 34, the median age for first-time homebuyers, Zillow...
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VR or Model Homes? Here’s Why Both are Key to Absorption
To stage, or not to stage? That is the question builders and developers ponder today thanks to the advent of virtual reality (and I did too in my last Builder and Developer magazine column). VR has become a requisite due to the way buyers search for homes a whopping...
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The Art & Science of Model Home Merchandising
Creating model homes for imaginary clients sounds like a dream job. That is what people tell us when we explain the strategy behind model home merchandising, while the professionals we work with insist we get to do the fun stuff. While we love what we do, it is just...
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Style + Substance: Interior Design Trends for Spring
This season, the design is all about harmony. Springtime simplicity flawlessly intermingles with bursts of color, shapes, and textures. Discover styles that spark creativity and inspire serenity as experts from Mary Cook & Associates shine a light on five main...
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How to Maximize Multi-generational Homes
Whether it’s a millennial adult moving back home to save money or aging parents joining the family in an in-law suite, multi-generational living is a housing trend that savvy builders can’t afford to ignore if they want to sell homes. U.S. Census data...
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