Karen Tanner Allen
Washington Post

When her daughter started high school, Susan Jaquet took a hard look at the basement of her American University Park house.

“I always wanted to have a house where our kids and their friends would hang out,” she said.

Her daughter had deemed the family room too public for entertaining, so Jaquet converted part of the basement into a small living area, with big comfortable sofas, a big-screen TV and a refrigerator stocked with Gatorade and soft drinks.

Despite the effort, her daughter, now 21, didn’t spend much time in the new basement. But her teenage son and his friends do.

“It’s just a small little room, but they’re very happy here,” said Jaquet, a real estate agent.

Any campaign to improve a home’s teen appeal may seem like a big investment for just a few years and for hard-to-please customers. But when the kids suddenly grow taller than you and don’t need chauffeuring; when you no longer arrange their social calendars; and when everybody in the family needs some more privacy, it could be time to rethink where you live.

In more urban neighborhoods where living space is at a premium, a refinished rec room might matter when it is time to sell a house. When the housing market was stronger, an average of 80 percent of a $54,000 basement remodeling in Washington was recouped in a home’s resale, according to a 2007 cost vs. value report by Remodeling magazine.

But it probably would make little difference in outlying areas where houses already are large, some home contractors say. Renovating for teenagers is usually more about quality of life than real estate returns.

Many parents redo rec rooms on the theory that it’s better for their child to spend time with friends downstairs than on street corners or in unfamiliar houses. Some even decide to move altogether, to be closer to schools or public transportation and so keep up with their teenagers’ busier social lives. One Mount Rainier mother installed a skateboard ramp in her yard.

Jody Callen admits that the ramp was a deliberate attempt to make her 15-year-old son want to spend time at her house almost as much as he does his father’s, which is closer to friends and school.

“He doesn’t like my neighborhood as much. But he likes my house because it has a half-pipe in my back yard,” said Callen, owner of Glad Rags, an eclectic clothing and gift shop in Takoma Park. “So he comes over with his friends. . . . It’s not fancy, but it’s fun.”

Unlike Callen’s half-pipe — about $200 and removable — some changes are more expensive and more permanent. The Horkley boys were 11 and 14 when the family bumped out the basement walls and moved a staircase as part of a large-scale renovation of their Northwest Washington Colonial four years ago.

“A big priority for us was having a place where the kids’ friends would want to come over and hang out,” said their mother, Katharine Abraham, a University of Maryland professor. “I felt like I wanted to know these kids.”

They brought in the requisite sectional sofa, big-screen TV and gaming station. They put in a pool table in the second room and stocked a pantry and refrigerator with snacks from Costco.

It seemed to work for her older son, now a freshman in college. Sometimes the kids would “come over and eat food and leave,” Abraham said. Other times, the parents noticed that groups of kids stayed in the basement, even after their own son may have left for sports practice. Her husband, Graham Horkley, thought that was a little odd, Abraham said. “But it made me happy; I liked having them around.”

Creating a separate space for teenagers to socialize is a worthy goal that can be accomplished even on a low budget, according to family therapist Emory Luce Baldwin of Takoma Park. Providing a place where “the furnishings aren’t too fancy and the noise doesn’t disturb others . . . seems to be a nice way to respect that kids want to get together and want to have fun.”

This can be achieved simply with a sofa, a couple of beanbags and something for entertainment. Most important, she points out, is parents’ attitude — giving the kids a sense of privacy and not stressing over the furniture or fussing over a little noise.

“At the same time, I think it’s crucially important that we don’t send them to such far ends of the house that we don’t have a sense of what’s going on,” she said. “They also need to know that we plan to walk through the room where they are hanging out, occasionally.”

That was Abraham and Horkley’s idea when they designed their basement without doors to keep the kids in earshot. It’s a feature they are starting to regret. Their younger son, now in 10th grade, uses the basement more for playing music than for entertaining friends. He has taken up the drums.

“The sound goes right upstairs to the house,” Abraham said.

Real estate agents and contractors say they see family clients more when children are smaller and just beginning to outgrow a house. But there also are features that make life with teens easier.

For instance, a popular fix to older homes that works for the teenage years and beyond is the two-story addition, said Chris Landis of Landis Construction in Washington, which has done about 20 or 30 of those in the past 16 years. Such an addition not only pops out the kitchen and family room, but also moves over the master bedroom, creating more bedrooms and more privacy upstairs for older children, he said.

Many people who put on such an addition don’t also want to spend extra on the basement underneath. As a parent of teenagers, Landis believes that improved basements are worth it. They can provide the right combination of soundproofing and extra space for Ping-Pong and hobbies, he said.

When children are younger, parents want to have them in view most of the time. That changes. “Teenagers love to be somewhere their parents aren’t,” said Mindy Mitchell, design consultant for Sun Design Remodeling Specialists in Burke, which has remodeled numerous basements and other spaces in Northern Virginia. “We strive for functional yet cozy.”

For older kids, the most important feature is designated space that separates them from their parents, she said. Furniture should be flexible and movable. The room should have plenty of light so it feels less like a basement. Wet bars are nice.

But even the fanciest rec room can flop as a hangout spot — especially for teens who don’t yet have their driver’s license — if it’s too far from their social life.

When Bill and Marcia Rock bought their Takoma Park house five years ago, it seemed an ideal location for them and their two young daughters: lovely Long Branch Park just across the street; downtown Takoma Park less than a mile away; a terraced back yard with room for a tree house, and on a street filled with families of young kids.

But now their daughters, Lucy and Anna, are 9 and 14, and attend schools on the other side of Rock Creek Park. Both have active sports and social lives. Anna would like to move closer to her friends, and for the whole family, the driving got to be too much. It also seems time to get the girls out of bunk beds.

Their Takoma Park house is for sale, and they’re looking for a new house, probably in the District. Anna thinks it would be great if her new room had slanted ceilings to show off her posters. The house should have a “crash pad” where kids could hang out without the rest of the family, she said. And it would be nice to be near Metro. That way, “I can just hop on and be with friends.”