Pollution, allergens and Covid have homeowners focusing on filtration systems and flexible designs to improve indoor air quality
7 min
Visitors to John Bautista and Pedro Salrach’s San Francisco home can’t get enough of the lap pool, sauna and movie theatre. But they also get a whiff of something else they value: clean air.
“The house smells new—and after two years it still smells new,” said Bautista, an attorney. “I know when I’m home because it smells clean and fresh.”
The six-bedroom home with seven bathrooms and two half-baths includes an elaborate air-filtration system meant to deal with the region’s varying air quality. The tightly sealed floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors offer hilltop views of the bay and access to the backyard without sacrificing air quality.
Bautista plans to further upgrade his system this year with the aim of filtering and recirculating indoor air rather than fresh outside air during periods of heavy pollution. Despite the home’s superior air quality, the family can still feel a difference on days when the outdoor air is filled with smoke. “We’ve suffered, as most people have in the Bay Area,” he said. “What we want to have is isolation.”
Developer Gregory Malin, who specialises in wellness-focused real estate, sold Bautista the home for $32 million, he said, plus an additional $5 million for fixtures and furnishings.
Luxury homeowners are known to splurge on sleek kitchens, custom decor and art, but they are increasingly turning their attention to something less visible. Forest-fire smoke, the pandemic and increased awareness of sensitivities to mould and other irritants are making their interior environment a priority.
Many are investing in complex systems and flexible designs that promise healthier indoor air but still include spaces, such as glass-enclosed rooms, that make being indoors feel natural.
Listings are increasingly touting pollution-fighting amenities to lure home buyers. In Santa Rosa, Calif., a 13-acre estate for sale at $15 million has a whole-home air purifier. This spring, the Dovecote building, under construction in Manhattan’s Harlem neighbourhood, will offer six, three-bedroom condos built to strict green and clean-air standards, starting at $1.5 million.
Malin, founder of Troon Pacific, a San Francisco-based developer of $15 million to $45 million properties that he calls healthy homes, said he focuses on the smallest details that can affect air quality. New tools allow for more-precise measurement of various particulate matter and carbon dioxide levels, he added. “Covid changed people’s perspective on connecting air quality to health, and the [wildfires] only enhanced that.”
His company’s newer homes have exhaust fans, tied to ventilation systems, in laundry rooms and under sinks, where there are various pollutants and harmful cleaning products, said Malin. Their garages have separate exhaust fans that go on long enough for three air exchanges after the door opens. Ionisation-based filtration systems also are included to eliminate airborne particles too tiny to see but hazardous when inhaled.
His homes also feature perforated piping with in-line fans to exhaust air from under slab foundations to keep contaminated soil vapours from entering the houses.
He said his company is considering building to the Living Building Challenge standard, in which homes have their own electricity, water and waste management. Demand is high for such standards, he said, including passive-home construction, where airtight homes are built using specific materials and energy-efficient systems that circulate highly filtered air. He said passive-home certification is costly, especially for big homes, and has limitations that some homeowners don’t want, like bulky windows. In the long run, however, he said eliminating most heating and cooling bills is probably worth it.
Clean air has become more of a talking point in homeownership, added Elliott Gall, an associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering who researches indoor-air quality at Portland State University.
While high-rises are often built to be airtight, there is a greater focus now on having windows that open while adding better filtration systems, he said. Units with outdoor access sometimes give homeowners another way to control the humidity and indoor air-pollution levels inside the home, he added.
To improve the air quality in her new Charleston, S.C., home, Caroline Smythe, 67, imported a hemp block covered in a mixture of lime and sand for the construction, rather than standard brick. Living in a high-humidity area means moisture can cause mould, said Smythe, whose 2,400-square-foot Lowcountry home was completed in 2023 for about $1 million, including $250,000 for the land.
Incorporating the new material allows the moisture to get absorbed in the walls and keeps humidity steady in the home. “It has very much an earthy feel,” said Smythe of her thick, soundproof walls.
Inside, the home’s two bedrooms and two offices have additional air-filtration elements, including stand-alone air filters for each bedroom. Smythe, a psychiatrist, chose a bamboo kitchen countertop and mineral-based wall paint to prevent any chemical off-gassing. “It makes a huge difference,” she said.
Homeowners have long tried to improve air quality. In the early 1900s, homes that let in fresh air were critical to good health, but by the 1950s some owners were trying to tame outdoor air pollution by focusing on better insulation. More recently, the pandemic made access to outdoor air essential, and turned the focus again to indoor-outdoor living.
Today’s picture is mixed. Climate change has made outdoor air quality less reliable, with the added problems of prolonged forest fires.
Many people are realising their indoor air quality is often compromised by a combination of poor indoor airflow, activities like cooking and cleaning, and outdoor pollutants that settle into confined spaces, said Gall. Homeowners now want better control over their wider living space, including modifiable systems that deal with both indoor and outdoor pollution, he added.
Jason Glatt, a commercial window contractor, and his wife, Lauren Glatt, a stay-at-home mom, of North Bethesda, Md., built a $2.5 million home that includes a children’s slide into a basement playroom, an attic-level cigar room and plenty of entertaining space.
The 11,000-square-foot home’s most striking feature, however, may be the five HVAC units tucked inside utility closets and other closed rooms, controlled by eight thermostats that regulate the air quality as well as temperature in each part of the home. Their $120,000 HVAC system also includes UV lights to prevent mold.
Seth Ballard, an architect who worked with the Glatt family, said individually controlled temperature zones and more return-air vents promote better air flow. Costs can be $100,000 to $200,000 for a 10,000- to 15,000-square-foot house. “They are choosing this over a kitchen countertop,” he said of homeowners in general.
Charlotte of the Upper West Side, a building in Manhattan that opened in 2023, has seven full-floor units, each with a private entrance. The building has airtight construction with enhanced insulation. Each unit has an independent heating-and-cooling system with fresh-air filtration directly into the home that isn’t shared with other spaces.
The system can achieve full air exchange 13 times a day in normal-use mode and more than 28 times a day in boost mode, said the building’s developer John Roe of the New York-based Roe Corp. The building uses louvers outside the windows to deflect the heat of the sun and cut energy use on summer days.
Roe, who lives in one of the building’s 3,570-square-foot, four bedroom, 4.5-bathroom homes, said the air-filtration system and strict passive-home construction added 15% to the building cost.
Three of the building’s units are on sale, from $8.35 million to $17 million.
He said there is little dust in the home, and he swears it now takes longer for his cut white hydrangeas to wilt.
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What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
Unmarried home buyers say they are giving priority to a financial foundation over a legal one
4 min
The big wedding can wait. Couples are deciding they would rather take the plunge into homeownership.
In reshuffling the traditional order of adult milestones, some couples may decide not to marry at all, while others say they are willing to delay a wedding. Buying a home is as much, if not more of a commitment, they reason. It helps them build financial stability when the housing market is historically unaffordable.
In 2023, about 555,000 unmarried couples said that they had bought their home in the previous year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Census Bureau data. That is up 46% from 10 years earlier, when just under 381,000 couples did the same.
Unmarried couples amounted to more than 11% of all U.S. home sales. The percentage has climbed steadily over the past two decades—a period in which marriage rates have fallen. These couples make up triple the share of the housing market that they did in the mid-1980s, according to the National Association of Realtors.
To make it work, couples must look past the significant risk that the relationship could blow up, or something could happen to one partner. Without a marriage certificate, living situations and finances are more likely to fall into limbo, attorneys say.
Mark White, 59 years old, and Sheila Davidson, 62, bought a lakeside townhouse together in Newport News, Va., in 2021. But only her name is on the deed. He sometimes worries about what would happen to the house if something happened to her. They have told their children that he should inherit the property, but don’t have formal documentation.
“We need to get him on the deed at some point,” Davidson said.
White and Davidson both had previous marriages, and decided they don’t want to do it again. They also believe tying the knot would affect their retirement benefits and tax brackets.
Couples that forgo or postpone marriage say they are giving priority to a financial foundation over a legal one. The median homeowner had nearly $400,000 in wealth in 2022, compared with roughly $10,000 for renters, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Even couples that get married first are often focused on the house. Many engaged couples ask for down-payment help in lieu of traditional wedding gifts.
“A mortgage feels like a more concrete step toward their future together than a wedding,” said Emily Luk, co-founder of Plenty, a financial website for couples.
Elise Dixon and Nick Blue, both 29, watched last year as the Fed lifted rates, ostensibly pushing up the monthly costs on a mortgage. The couple, together for four years, decided to use $80,000 of their combined savings, including an unexpected inheritance she received from her grandfather, to buy a split-level condo in Washington, D.C.
“Buying a house is actually a bigger commitment than an engagement,” Dixon said.
They did that, too, getting engaged eight months after their April 2023 closing date. They are planning a small ceremony on the Maryland waterfront next year with around 75 guests, which they expect to cost less than they spent on the home’s down payment and closing costs.
The ages at which people buy homes and enter marriages have both been trending upward. The median age of first marriage for men is 30.2, and for women, 28.6, according to the Census Bureau. That is up from 29.3 and 27.0 a decade earlier. The National Association of Realtors reported this year that the median age of first-time buyers was 38, up from 31 in 2014.
Family lawyers—and parents—sometimes suggest protections in case the unmarried couple breaks up. A prenup-like cohabitation agreement spells out who keeps the house, and how to divide the financial obligations. Without the divorce process, a split can be even messier, legal advisers say.
Family law attorneys say more unmarried people are calling for legal advice, but often balk at planning for a potential split, along with the cost of drawing up such agreements, which can range from $1,000 to $3,000, according to attorney-matching service Legal Match.
Dixon, the Washington condo buyer, said she brushed off her mother’s suggestion that she draft an agreement with Blue detailing how much she invested, figuring that their mutual trust and equal contributions made it unnecessary. (They are planning to get a prenup when they wed, she said.)
There are a lot of questions couples don’t often think about, such as whether one owner has the option to buy the other out, and how quickly they need to identify a real-estate agent if they decide to sell, said Ryan Malet, a real-estate lawyer in the D.C. region.
The legal risks often don’t deter young home buyers.
Peyton Kolb, 26, and her fiancé figured that a 150-person wedding would cost $200,000 or more. Instead, they bought a three-bedroom near Tampa with a down payment of less than $50,000.
“We could spend it all on one day, or we could invest in something that would build equity and give us space to grow,” said Kolb, who works in new-home sales.
Owning a place where guests could sleep in an extra bedroom, instead of on the couch in their old rental, “really solidified us starting our lives together,” Kolb said. Their wedding is set for next May.
Homes and weddings have both gotten more expensive, but there are signs that home prices are rising faster. From 2019 to 2023, the median sales price for existing single-family homes rose by 44%, according to the National Association of Realtors. The average cost of a wedding increased 25% over that time, according to annual survey data from The Knot.
Roughly three quarters of couples move in together before marriage, and may already be considering the trade-offs between buying and renting. The cost of both has risen sharply over the past few years, but rent rises regularly while buying with a fixed-rate mortgage caps at least some of the costs.
An $800 rent hike prompted Sonali Prabhu and Ryan Willis, both 27, to look at buying. They were already paying $3,200 in monthly rent on their two-bedroom Austin, Texas, apartment, and felt they had outgrown it while working from home.
In October, they closed on a $425,000 three-bed, three-bath house. Their mortgage payment is $200 more than their rent would have been, but they have more space. They split the down payment and she paid about $50,000 for some renovations.
Her dad’s one request was that the house face east for good fortune, she said. Both parents are eagerly awaiting an engagement.
“We’re very solid right now,” said Prabhu, who plans to get married in 2026. “The marriage will come when it comes.”
