The 2025 Happy Homes Report

1/7/2026

Hi there!

Thanks for joining me and welcome to our third annual Happy Homes Report! This is our take on an annual business report. Before we get into 2025, a brief history of the last 11 years of Designed Happy to catch you up…

Designed Happy was started in 2014 as a blog to educate homeowners on the design/build process. At the peak of the blog, there were a couple thousand site visitors a month – much more than was ever expected at the start, but not enough to make Designed Happy a business. In 2017, and after some success and positive feedback from a pre-school fundraising program, Designed Happy became an LLC and began offering consulting services. We got a lot of positive feedback from people who were looking for unbiased home advice but didn’t know where to find it. We enjoyed helping the few people who were referred or happened to find us, but there was never any kind of marketing effort to help prop these consultations up. In 2020, and during the pandemic, there was all kinds of time available from not commuting. It was during this time that Designed Happy: The Book was written. The goal of the book was, and is, to help homeowners have better and more fulfilling design and construction experiences. It was meant to be a combination of the blog and the consultations. I can very happily report that we have sold thousands of copies of the book, both to individual homeowners and like-minded remodeling companies wanting to help educate their clients and potential clients. Because the goal of writing the book was not to get rich $20 at a time, we can also happily report that we’ve given away many copies to people starting their home project journey. 2023 was Designed Happy’s first year as a full service luxury design firm, and if you want a recap of what we accomplished, you can read the 2023 review (TL:DR, we killed it).

2025 was a big year for growth here at Designed Happy, in ways you’d expect and some you may not. Big picture, we grew our design service and doubled (tripled?) down on our mission to help people live happier at home by providing educational resources about the industry and process.

Continue reading to learn what we’ve been up to.

With gratitude,
TJ

Designed Happy - Brand and Culture

Company mission
- To help people live happier at home.
Core Values
- Fun
  - We don’t have to do this – we get to do this. This should be fun for us and our clients.
- 1% Better
  - Let’s be a little bit better today than we were yesterday, and a little bit better tomorrow than we are today.
- French Fries
  - Find ways to be unreasonably hospitable – bring the fries that no one asked for.
- Smile
  - Emotions are contagious; therefore, happiness is a competitive advantage.
- Empathy
  - “The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.” – Plato

Projects - By the Numbers

Total number of design starts: 31
A design start is a new paid design project. It could include any combination of architecture, interior design, or décor.

Total number of tiny gratis projects (not included above): 3
We occasionally get requests from people who need help, but the help needed doesn’t really fit into what we generally do. For example, the pre-school my kids went to wanted to put a shed on the property. They reached out to the county and were told they needed a site plan. They had an old one but needed to draw the shed to scale on the site plan. It would have been difficult for them to figure out how to do it, but for us it was a quick and easy task, so we were happy to help them out.

You might be noticing that the total number of projects in 2025 is lower than in 2024. You might then be thinking to yourself, “hey didn’t he mention growth a couple pages ago?” At the end of 2024 when we were planning for 2025 growth, we very specifically aimed to do fewer overall projects but ones that were larger. Larger could mean more scope (ex, an addition instead of bathroom), or it could mean the same scope but the projects combine several of our services (architecture, interior design, custom cabinetry, bespoke furniture). So yes, we did fewer projects in 2025 than we did in 2024, but as you’ll see in a minute, we absolutely nailed our growth goal.

Projects by location:

DC - 1
MD - 19
VA – 11

Projects by type:
Are you interested in the kinds of rooms that people were remodeling in 2025? Here’s a breakdown of the rooms that made up the 31 projects above (most projects include more than one room/space):

New construction - 3
Whole houses/condos remodel – 1
1-Story additions - 4
2-Story additions – 3
Add-story additions (putting a 2nd floor on a 1-story home) - 2
Kitchens - 14
Primary bathrooms - 9
Primary bedrooms – 8
Family rooms - 2
Hall bathrooms - 4
Powder rooms - 1
Mudrooms – 7
Basements - 4
Screen porches – 3
Decks/Patios – 2

We saw some trends change this year. In 2024 everyone wanted a screen porch, which was a continuation of a COVID trend. This year, they weren’t as important to people. Kitchens and primary suites maintained their dominance as the most common types of projects homeowners are doing. And finally, elevators continue to trend upward as a project type people in high end homes are interested in doing. I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Revenue:
While I’m not going to give you the exact numbers here (sorry), we did have a year-over-year increase of almost double. I didn’t go to business school, but I think the technical term they teach for a 2x increase is NICE! Remember before when I said we did fewer projects this year? Our goal was to increase our average job size, which is a very simple calculation that takes the total annual revenue and divides it by the total number of projects in the year. For us, that is important because we bring the most value to big, complex projects that require a combination of our services. When we find projects like that, I know that we’re making our clients’ lives easier because hiring one company that can handle all 4 (architecture, interior design, custom cabinetry, bespoke furniture) of those things means there is less for them to manage themselves. Can you imagine hiring 4 different design professionals for one project?! Sounds crazy, but people do it.

To wrap this revenue piece up, I don’t expect our design work to double or triple every year the way it has the last two. In fact, I don’t want it to. I’m very aware that our level of service doesn’t scale. We’ll likely double our design revenue again over the next few years, but after that, the growth plan will be slow and steady. But fear not, we have some exciting things planned for the next 2 years that could see total revenue take some healthy steps upward.

Education

As mentioned at the beginning, I started Designed Happy as a blog. My idea was simple: If I can find a way to help homeowners understand the process better, it’s more likely they will make decisions that will lead them to happier and more fulfilling outcomes, and over time, we will hear fewer and fewer remodeling horror stories. That idea was well received by the marketplace, and it launched a business.
In 2025, we doubled, maybe even tripled down on that idea. With the help of our Director of Happiness, Katie, this year we:

Continued our monthly blog post
- It feels good to get back to our roots. Between running the business, working with clients, and being an engaged father and husband, I had gotten out of the routine of writing blog posts. Luckily, Katie is an A+ writer and picked up where I left off. Blogs go in and out of fashion, but we will remain committed to creating high quality written content.
Launched a podcast
- Yep, we have one too! We know not everyone wants to read a blog or a book, so Katie and I cohost Designed Happy: The Podcast. New episodes are available every Tuesday morning, and we discuss the human side of home design, remodeling, and new construction. We share tips and stories, exercises and worksheets, all aimed at helping our listeners/viewers have better and more fulfilling experiences. Our first episode came out in August, and the results, especially on YouTube, have been amazing. We’re getting around 1k listens/views per episode and went from zero to 5,000 YouTube subscribers in just a few months.
Created a comic strip
- When your very first core value is FUN, you better be fun. I can’t tell you exactly how this came up, but Katie, Andrea, and I were in our weekly team meeting, and someone said something hilarious, and I said, “oh, I wish we had a comic strip!” And then I thought to myself, “silly guy, you don’t need to wish, you call the shots here.” So, we created a comic strip. It’s called Nailed It, and we try to bring light to the silly and ridiculous situations we sometimes find ourselves in when talking about, planning, or conducting remodeling projects.

To give you a sense of what we’re up to, here is our very first comic:

We partner with local artists Hannah and Todd Churn help us turn our ideas into reality.

New Nailed Its come out monthly and can be found on our blog, or if you want a sneak peek before everyone else…

Started a monthly newsletter
- With all of this content, we wanted a simple and fun way for you to stay up to date. Every month we send out our latest blog post, a new Nailed It, 4 podcast episodes, and a little bit of nonsense. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

As you saw at the beginning of this report, our company’s mission is to help people live happier at home. It’s not: design cool stuff for people who can afford it (although that is how we currently generate our revenue). We are actively investing our time and resources to help everyone we can, even (and maybe especially) those who we can’t work with directly. So, if you know someone, anyone, who is actively thinking about a project, might be thinking about a project, or just complained to you about how their family is too cramped in the house, or the kitchen doesn’t work anymore, please share some of this content with them. We want to help, whatever that means to them.

The End

In this exact spot 2 years ago, I told you that I had recently read that plants can either grow roots or blooms but can’t grow both at the same time. 2025 was another phenomenal Bloom year for Designed Happy. As you saw, we grew…a lot. And as you also saw, we built the foundation of machine to generate worthwhile, sharable content that people will find value in, 2025 was also a great Roots year.

Looking ahead to 2026, we already have fun and transformative projects on the boards that will help with Bloom growth. I’m really, really excited for the Roots growth though. I don’t know if it will be in our 2026 or 2027 report, but when these new Roots turn into Blooms, be prepared for a fun annual report.

It is not lost on me how much has changed for Designed Happy in the last 11 years, and how fortunate I am to have the opportunity to work with amazing clients and partners, and to lead our uber talented team. I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I imagine this is what Michael Scott felt like when he found out Holly wasn’t engaged after she came back to the Scranton branch.

I’m so, so excited for 2026 - check back in a year for our Happy Homes Report 2026 to see how we did.

Thanks again for your interest – I really do appreciate it.

TJ