The enquiry says kitchen. You book the visit, you walk in, and it is the mudroom. Or the lockers by the back door. Or a basement library with a ladder. Or a room for shoes.
Every shop knows this and almost no shop is set up for it. The intake form asks for linear feet of upper and lower. The estimate template has a kitchen shape baked into it. The take-off assumes a run of boxes against a wall, and then the job turns out to be shelving, glass, a bench, a hanging rail and lighting.
This post is what the published surveys actually say about that shift, and what a non-kitchen take-off does to the way you price.
Read the numbers carefully, because three kinds are circulating
Before any figure, a warning that will save you from repeating something untrue.
Three different kinds of percentage get quoted in this space and they mean completely different things. Homeowner adoption is the share of renovating homeowners who actually installed the thing. Professional sentiment is the share of surveyed designers who agree with a statement. A net popularity index is the share saying a feature is increasing minus the share saying it is decreasing.
A net index reading of 21 percent for mudrooms does not mean 21 percent of homes have one. If you repeat these as though they are the same number, you will be wrong in a way a client can catch.
Storage is no longer an upgrade
The clearest finding is not about rooms at all. It is about storage.
In the 2026 kitchen trends study, built-in specialty storage appears in 94 percent of renovated kitchens. The most common single item is a pullout for waste or recycling at 64 percent, followed by dedicated spots for cookie sheets and trays at 55 percent, spices at 41 percent, and cutlery and a built-in microwave at 38 percent each (Houzz, published 20 January 2026, read 2026-09-19). That study surveyed 1,780 US homeowners, fielded 6 to 30 July 2025.
Ninety-four percent is not a trend. It is the baseline. If your estimate treats specialty storage as an add-on that occasionally appears, your estimate is describing a kitchen almost nobody is buying.
The pantry is the biggest built-in there is
The same study ranks built-in features during a kitchen renovation. Pantry cabinets lead at 47 percent. Beverage stations follow at 24 percent, built-in seating and wine fridges at 17 percent each, walk-in pantries at 16 percent, breakfast bars at 14 percent, baking stations at 9 percent, and butler's pantries or prep kitchens at 7 percent (Houzz, published 13 January 2026, read 2026-09-19).
The butler's pantry detail is the useful part for scoping. Among newly added or upgraded butler's pantries, 67 percent have storage for small appliances, 61 percent have a prep counter and 59 percent have enclosed cabinetry, with open shelving in 52 percent.
That is a different take-off from a kitchen run. It is a counter, a mix of closed and open storage, and appliance provision in a small footprint. Priced on a kitchen linear-foot rate it will come out wrong in both directions: too low on the millwork density, too high on the appliance and countertop assumptions.
Mudrooms, flex rooms, and the honest counterweight
On the professional side, 94 percent of surveyed kitchen and bath professionals agree that homeowners are adding functional spaces like mudrooms and flex-office spaces. The same report describes the driver as practical personalisation, and names a customised pet station, a mudroom with a drop zone, and a walk-in pantry with a beverage station, extra sink or refrigerator and countertop appliance storage (NKBA and KBIS, published 18 September 2025, read 2026-09-19). That survey ran online among 634 respondents from the NKBA community, 67 percent of them designers.
Now the counterweight, because the picture is not uniformly up.
Architects surveyed quarterly report special room requests as a net popularity index. In the Q2 2025 reading, in-law suites and junior ADUs topped the list at 46 percent, outdoor living at 40 percent, additional multi-function or flexible space at 33 percent, home office at 30 percent, down from 40 percent a year earlier, and mudrooms at 21 percent, down from 27 percent. Built-in storage as a home feature sat at 22 percent, down from 25 percent (AIA 2025 Q3 Home Design Trends Survey, published August 2025, read 2026-09-19).
So do not write, and do not tell a client, that every specialty room is booming. The defensible version is narrower and more interesting: storage and multi-function space is being built into everything, while single-purpose rooms like the dedicated home office are softening.
Wine is the one clear riser in that data. The architect survey covering Q1 2025 recorded a 12 point rise in popularity for wine storage and a 4 point rise for butler's pantries (AIA, published 24 April 2025, read 2026-09-19).
Why this is happening: the house stopped growing
The pressure behind all of it is square footage.
Median new home size levelled off at 2,155 square feet in 2025, essentially unchanged from 2,150 in 2024, and builders expect to incorporate more transition or flex spaces such as drop zones and multiple purpose rooms (NAHB, published 18 February 2026, read 2026-09-19).
Meanwhile the space that does exist is being reallocated. Among surveyed kitchen and bath professionals, 75 percent said kitchens are getting larger even if homes are not, 71 percent said dining rooms are decreasing, 81 percent said reducing clutter to make kitchens feel larger is a priority, and 79 percent said clients prefer eliminating the formal dining room altogether (Kitchen & Bath Business, published 22 December 2025, read 2026-09-19).
A flat house with no dining room and a mandate to reduce clutter is a house that buys millwork in rooms that are not the kitchen.
Closets, laundries and who is buying them
Laundry is the most wanted feature in the buyer research, though the current published breakdown is now dated. A survey of more than 3,000 recent and prospective home buyers put a laundry room at 86 percent, garage storage at 81 percent and a walk-in pantry at 80 percent (NAHB Eye On Housing, published 3 April 2024, read 2026-09-19). That is the 2024 edition and it is well over eighteen months old. Use it with the date attached.
Where laundry lands matters for your install. In 2024, 70 percent of new single-family homes had laundry connections on the first floor, 28 percent on the second and 2 percent in the basement, and among age-restricted homes 93 percent were on the first floor (NAHB Eye On Housing, published 3 November 2025, read 2026-09-19, using Census Survey of Construction data).
On closets, the clearest recent signal is generational. Reporting from the 2026 Houzz & Home study, 33 percent of Gen Z homeowners remodelled a laundry room and 24 percent upgraded closets, against 14 percent and 17 percent for older generations (Domino, published 23 April 2026, read 2026-09-19). That breakdown is not on the public study page, so it is cited here as reported rather than as a direct study citation. The public study page does confirm the scale: 20,358 users surveyed, including 10,176 renovating US homeowners, with 31 percent undertaking projects costing $50,000 or more and 91 percent hiring at least one professional (Houzz, published 22 April 2026, read 2026-09-19).
What a specialty room does to the take-off
Here is the pricing consequence, and it is the reason this matters more than a trend post usually does.
A kitchen rate per linear foot is an average of a known mix: boxes, doors, drawers, a run of counter, standard hardware. A specialty room breaks the mix. A library is mostly shelving and very few drawers. A locker run is a bench, hooks, open cubbies and maybe two doors. A wine room is racking and temperature constraints. A shoe room is shallow, dense and almost entirely adjustable.
Then there are the things a kitchen rate half-absorbs and a specialty room does not. Lighting is the clearest. Among surveyed professionals, under-cabinet lighting sits at 82 percent and interior cabinet lighting at 72 percent (NKBA and KBIS, published 18 September 2025, read 2026-09-19). On the homeowner side the most recent published breakdown is older: under-cabinet lights at 71 percent of renovated kitchens (Houzz 2025 study, published 16 January 2025, read 2026-09-19). The 2026 study dropped that breakdown, so 2025 is the latest figure that exists and it is dated.
Glass is in the same position. The only glass-front figure available is from the 2025 study, where glass-front cabinets ranked highest among the cabinet features homeowners selected at 36 percent, ahead of Shaker-style at 23 percent. Same source, same date, same caveat.
Lighting at roughly seven or eight cabinets in ten is not an exception. It is part of the job. If your estimate treats it as a surprise, you are surprised on most jobs.
What this means for a two-person shop
Three changes, none of which need new software to start.
Branch your intake on room type before you ask for a take-off. A library, a locker run and a pantry each need a different set of questions, and asking for upper and lower linear feet on a shoe room produces a number you will not trust.
Give every room type a free-text field for what does not compute, and read it. The variance is the job. A fixed set of room shapes plus notes gets you most of the way. A form builder gets you a second product to maintain.
Price add-ons as catalogue lines off your own rates, not as figures you invent at the end. Lighting, glass fronts and specialty hardware turn up often enough that they deserve a rate. A line priced off your own book survives a client question. A number you typed to make the total feel right does not.
What is not public
There is no published figure for how much of a small cabinet shop's revenue comes from specialty rooms rather than kitchens. Trade press that would carry it was not reachable for verification, so no share is claimed here.
There is no dedicated pantry, mudroom or closet study from the major survey publishers. Pantry data sits inside the kitchen study and closet data inside the broader renovation study.
There is no survey-based adoption percentage for wine rooms. The only figure is the architects' net index change, which measures sentiment and not installs.
And there is no current homeowner-reported figure for glass fronts or under-cabinet lighting. The most recent ones are from January 2025 and are labelled as such above rather than quietly presented as today's.