As John McManus of Builder magazine notes, “An indoor-outdoor living space expands a floor-plan to where people living in a home can be outdoors, where air, nature, thermal and moisture composition is more balanced, more harmonious, more healthy. Which is part—albeit unconscious—of why people like indoor-outdoor living, and opt to pay more for it. The ‘Million-Dollar view’ may be only part of the story. An outdoor living or dinning or kitchen or recreational space expands the livable square footage.”
Toll Brothers, the nation’s largest home builder, with 2018 revenues of over $5 billion, has discovered this, and has gone all-in on the programming for its just-opened community in Franklin Lakes, northern New Jersey, Reserve at Franklin Lakes, where its Signature Collection features Toll’s “largest estate homes on expansive home sites.” And it’s not just a trend in New Jersey: One out of every five homes Toll Brothers sold nationally in 2018 offered an indoor-outdoor living program feature.