Bravo’s newest real estate reality series “Sold on SLC” is set to lift the lid on the bustling housing market in the Mormon mecca of Salt Lake City, UT—but it will also debut a fascinating local design trend that will leave homeowners everywhere desperate to add it to their own properties: the Costco door.
Ahead of the show’s Dec. 4 premiere episode, two “Sold on SLC” stars, Matt Jones and Kenny Sperry, broke down the trend, telling Realtor.com® why the Costco door has become a must-have design upgrade for their clients.
The Costco door, they explained, is a direct opening between a home’s garage and pantry, which makes unloading and storing food items much easier and faster upon a homeowner’s return from the grocery store.
Though the concept might sound simple, Jones and Sperry say it has become a priority for a lot of their local clients, many of whom are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and have large families that require ample food supplies.
However, Jones and Sperry note that the functional design detail is something any homeowner could benefit from and is just one of the interesting elements that make SLC housing inventory stand out.
How is a Costco door incorporated into the design and function of a home?
Jones: It’s a 3-foot-by-3-foot door that is in the garage. The way these builders build houses is they like to have one of the walls in the garage share a wall with the pantry—and pantries in Utah are not coat closets.
A good pantry in Utah is the size of a walk-in closet, so 15 feet to 20 feet by 8 feet. They want that ground-level door so as a mom pulls into the garage, opens the back to her SUV, she could easily load directly into the pantry without having to go through the house. That’s the concept: that door opens, you shove everything in there, and then you can go in the pantry and organize it.
Sperry: The Costco door [and] the cold food storage room [are not] something that’s really widely known outside of Utah, but it’s something that is a really big deal because we’re LDS culture and all about storing food.
Why is having ample food storage space so important to the Mormon community?
Jones: In the Mormon religion, there’s a large part of the religion that teaches self-reliance. Part of that self-reliance is in the case of an emergency, loss of a job, or any of the scenarios where the food distribution gets cut off, can you be self-reliant? When that is pushed through a religious organization, people grab onto that.
What are your personal homes like?
Sperry: I’m a very big advocate when it comes to the real estate game. It’s a game of Monopoly, and if you’ve played the board game, it’s not far off of real life. I own my own home with a handful of rental properties that I rent out to other people.
My personal home, I grew up on a farm, so space was a big factor. The biggest thing that my wife and I were looking for when we purchased this home specifically, it wasn’t everything that we wanted in the house, [but] we had a very specific area that we wanted to be in because of the demographic and the schools; and then we wanted something where we could kind of stretch our legs a little bit.
Finding that in a suburb, it’s really hard to find properties with land. I think 0.17 [acres] is the average, less than a quarter of an acre right now. We’re on just over a half an acre. We have some chickens and animals and our house is just about 4,000 square feet.
Jones: The house I’m living in now my wife and I bought exactly 10 years ago. It [was] built in 1995. It is in the foothills of some of the mountains here in Utah, so we have some really cool views. We don’t love the street being on a hill, but it’s a tradeoff when you get amazing views of the valley and the sunset every night.
We have remodeled 85% of our house because when we moved into it, it was almost original. The house is 30 years old, and we’ve put our own touches in everything from the kitchen to what I call my cave in the basement. It is a large room that does not have windows, so it’s not even technically a bedroom. It’s like a theater room slash gaming room slash office.
We love our house because we’ve had so much of our fingerprint on it but it is definitely not our forever home. [We’ve] got two bathrooms that we’re going to finish. One of them’s underway, and the other we haven’t started. After that, the house will be ready to market to a new young homeowner that wants to raise their family there like we have.
Season 1 of Bravo’s “Sold on SLC” premieres Dec. 4 at 9 p.m. EST.