Even before her new home in Leland’s Brunswick Forest community was complete, Arlene Jurow realized she’d need more space for guests.
“Last Christmas we were renting a beach house in Holden Beach while we were building and we had eight people staying with us,” said Jurow, a Mary Kay sales director. “That was when I realized that I wanted a smaller house, but that one guest room wasn’t going to make it.”
The Jurows downsized from a 4,000-square-foot house on five acres in Woodstock, N.Y., to the 2,300-square-foot abode on a third of an acre in Leland. Arlene’s husband, Les, is a retired dentist.
Their three-bedroom home includes a guest room, but after she and Les moved into the house in February of last year, Jurow decided she needed one more place for visitors to sleep. The couple turned to More Space Place, a business they spotted from their car as they rode down Oleander Drive.
“It was something we hadn’t anticipated doing when we first had the house built. We were just really thinking of this as Mary Kay space,” Jurow said, talking in what is now a home office/guest room at the front of her house. A queen-sized Murphy Bed (named after creator William Murphy, whose beds gained popularity in the early 1900s) folds down from one wall, while the wall facing her street holds cabinets and desks where she can work on a computer, package Mary Kay cosmetics to send to customers and complete other projects related to her thriving stay-at-home business.
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Jurow isn’t the only one who has chosen to use a home’s third bedroom this way. Sean Gamsby, sales and installation manager of the More Space Place businesses in Wilmington and North Myrtle Beach and son of owners Paul and Patty Gamsby, installed the bed, desks and cabinets as well as a closet organizational system at Jurow’s home. He said he has had a lot of clients with the same need.
“We’re usually in the third bedroom,” Gamsby said, referring to where installations of Murphy Bed/desk combinations often take place. “That way we can get the most out of that room. If you just put a queen bed in a small space, you usually can’t do anything else.”
He said that between Wilmington and North Myrtle Beach, More Space Place employees complete about 20 installations a month.
Transforming a third bedroom into a home office/guest room with professional help isn’t cheap. The queen-sized Murphy beds, including the mattress and installation, start at about $2,000. How much a homeowner spends depends on what he wants, including how much furniture he needs. The cost of the installation at Jurow’s was about $10,000, but that included a closet system.
Sean Gamsby and his father, Paul, said they believe more people will be trying to do more with less space in the new year. According to Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors statistics for New Hanover, Pender and northern Brunswick County released in December, home sales dropped from 397 in November 2009 to 310 in November 2010.
“People aren’t buying the bigger places. They’re buying the smaller homes or staying in their existing homes and not moving,” Sean Gamsby said.
With that in mind, making the most of every inch, even in the third bedroom, makes sense, he said.
“I always joke and say, ‘You’re basically renting that room out to a bed and not being able to use it for anything else,’ ” Gamsby said. “That’s why they’re usually getting the desk in there.”
Most of the installations only take eight hours, he said. They start with a customer coming in or calling and describing what they want. Then More Space Place designer Marianne Shelton puts together a 3D color rendering of the finished product.
“We just try to give them the best ideas that we can come up with,” Gamsby said.
The results have been successful for Jurow.
“Everybody who stays here loves it,” she said, sitting in one of her office chairs Monday.
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One surface of her large desk was filled with guest prizes of cosmetics she had assembled for an associate. The new home office/guest room is a far cry from the space she had when she started selling Mary Kay cosmetics 16 years ago. Jurow first used her bedroom, then her children’s playroom, both of which required clients to come through her house before getting down to business. During a recent non-business visit, one of her sons was staying in the guest bedroom while her brother stayed in the home office/guest room.
“It really does just meet the needs,” Jurow said. “And they (More Space Place) were very good about working to try and figure out exactly what space I needed.”