What it costs
Every design firm in this space publishes a budget minimum. None of them publishes a house. This is the real number for one three-bedroom rental that sleeps twelve — what it covers, what it deliberately doesn't, and how it compares to what everyone else says a three-bedroom should cost.
I've designed eight short-term rentals and run my own since 2018. The list behind this page is public — every piece, every room, four houses.
$38,000
Furnishing, Maple & Main
Furniture, decor and stocking. No hot tub, sauna, pool or game room — this market hasn’t needed them.
The comparison
These are the published figures, read off the sources’ own pages rather than someone’s summary of them. The third column is the one that usually gets left out: what each number actually covers.
| Source | Three-bedroom figure | Big amenities included? | What kind of number it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hayes & Co. Interiors | $40,000 | No | The minimum furnishing budget a project needs to qualify for their design service. A gate, not an estimate.Covers bedrooms, baths, one living area, one dining area, kitchen, halls, stairs, front porch, one deck. Amenity areas, bonus rooms and extra outdoor spaces are billed separately, starting at $7,000 per room. |
| Kenny Bedwell | $30,000–$45,000 | Yes | $10,000–$15,000 per bedroom in a medium-competition market.The exception in this table. His figure explicitly covers the whole house including the game room, and his separate rule — at least 20% of purchase price — names amenities outright. |
| STR Numbers | $28,000 | No | Mid-tier of a three-band table. Budget $18,000, premium $40,000+.Their calculator has 66 line items across seven categories and no amenity category at all. It budgets furniture for a pool area; it has no line to build one. |
| Awning | $18,000–$35,000 | No | Mid-range band. Budget tier starts at $8,000, premium runs past $65,000.A fire pit sits inside their furnishing tables. A hot tub does not — it appears separately, as something to budget $5,000–$15,000 for on top. |
| Brianna Michele Interiors | $12–$15 / sq ft | Not stated | The only dollar figure published on their site, framed as a recommendation rather than a floor. |
| AirDNA | $10,000–$20,000 | Not stated | A single aggregate for any Airbnb, not broken out by size. The most conservative figure from the most data-rich source. |
| Maple & Main | $38,000 | No | What I actually spent. Three bedrooms, twelve beds, seven rooms, 183 pieces, every one of them listed publicly. |
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Figures read directly from each source’s own site or podcast, September 2026. Where a source published a range, the range is shown rather than its midpoint. Nothing here is adjusted or estimated.
The read
I expected to find that the $40,000-ish benchmarks quietly assumed a hot tub and a game room, and that mine looked lean by comparison. The opposite turned out to be true. Awning keeps hot tubs out of its cost tables entirely. STR Numbers has no amenity category in its calculator. Hayes & Co bills amenity rooms separately, starting at $7,000 each. Only Kenny Bedwell folds them in, and he says so.
Which means $38,000 sits $2,000 under the budget a professional design firm requires before it will take a three-bedroom project at all — and it is the same kind of number. Furniture, decor, stocking. Both of us counting the same things.
That is useful in one direction only: it tells you the number is normal, not that it was right. The interesting question isn’t the total. It’s what the total was made of.
78%
of the pieces in the house cost under $100 each
7
items cost more than $500 — the sectional, the bunk bed, its mattresses, the washer/dryer and two vanities
183
separate decisions, each one published with the room it went in
Counted from the published furnishing list for this house. Price bands, not prices — retail prices move constantly and any figure I printed would be wrong within the month.
Where it goes
The strongest argument in this whole category isn't about how much to spend. It's about refusing to spend it uniformly. Kenny Bedwell's version, from his own podcast, is blunt about the arithmetic: a guest looks at roughly thirteen photographs before booking, so the rooms in those thirteen photographs are the rooms that earn.
“There is diminishing returns for every dollar you spend in design.”
Kenny Bedwell, Cash Flow PositiveHe puts the cost of ignoring this at $25,000 to $50,000 on a larger house — money spent making the fourth bedroom as good as the first, in a room no one photographs and no one mentions.
This matches what I have seen across four houses, from the opposite direction. The pieces guests name in five-star reviews are almost never the expensive ones. They name the second set of sheets, the outlet they could reach from the bed, the blackout curtain that actually blacked out. The expensive decisions — the mattress, the frame, the rug — only get mentioned when you get them wrong.
The other budget
A hot tub is not furniture. Neither is a sauna, a pool, a game room or a golf simulator. They are capital purchases, they are priced and financed differently, and in most published benchmarks they sit outside the furnishing number entirely — silently, without anyone explaining it.
The practical consequence: a host who budgets $5,000 a bedroom to furnish and then buys a hot tub has not blown the furnishing budget. They have made a second purchase nobody told them to plan for. That is where the mountain-market horror stories come from.
The line falls in a surprisingly specific place. Awning puts a fire pit — $325 to $2,000 to build — inside the furnishing budget, and a hot tub at $5,000 to $15,000 outside it. That is roughly where I’d draw it too.
| Amenity | What it costs installed | What the data actually shows |
|---|---|---|
| Fire pit | $325–$2,000 | Prefab from $75; propane $900–$2,000 installed; gas line $3,500–$8,000. The one amenity cheap enough to sit inside a furnishing budget.No measured revenue data from any credible source. The figures circulating are unattributed. |
| Hot tub | $6,000 avg | The best-evidenced amenity there is. AirDNA: 32% higher nightly rate, 9% higher occupancy, 52% higher RevPAR in winter, measured on three-bedroom whole homes.The premium is seasonal — 22% in winter against 15% in summer. Installation $2,000–$11,000 on top; maintenance $500–$1,000 a year. |
| Outdoor kitchen | $16,533 avg | Typical range $6,269–$27,087. Estimated $3,000–$8,000 a year in additional revenue, one-to-three-year payback.That estimate is modelled, not measured. Treat it as a projection. |
| Sauna | $8,500–$14,000 | No measured revenue data exists. None. The percentages being quoted trace back to secondhand host reports, not a study.Barrel saunas start around $4,390, but budgets that quote kit-only prices leave out $1,500–$3,800 of 240V electrical. |
| Game room | $2,000–$8,000 | The one revenue figure in circulation is unattributed — no study, no market, no sample size.The $8,000 ceiling is optimistic: a slate pool table alone runs $2,500–$5,000 before you add anything else. |
| Golf simulator | $8,000–$30,000+ | No published revenue data exists at all. The pages selling them hardest contain no figures whatsoever.Also needs about 10 ft of ceiling and a room 12–15 ft wide by 15–18 ft deep. Most houses can’t host one without converting a garage. |
| Pickleball court | $34,000 avg | No published revenue data exists. Range $20,000–$50,000; $70,000+ indoors. |
| In-ground pool | $65,909 avg | AirDNA: +38% RevPAR on three-bedroom homes — but the lift runs from 12% to 73% depending on the market, and cold or rural markets see almost none.Typical build $44,499–$87,349. Maintenance $500–$4,000 a year by pool type. |
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Install costs from Angi and HomeGuide contractor surveys, and from manufacturers’ own component pricing. Revenue figures from AirDNA and AirROI. Where I say no data exists, it means I went looking and found none — not that I didn’t check.
Read this before you quote any of it
All of them compare listings that have the thing against listings that don’t. None follows the same property before and after. None controls for finish level, view, size, photography or how good the host is. AirDNA’s own data says hot tubs appear in 33% of luxury listings and 5% of budget ones — so a large part of that 32% gap is simply that people who install hot tubs also buy better houses.
Use the nightly-rate premiums. Be sceptical of anything phrased as a revenue multiple, particularly on a page that also sells you the amenity.
The decision
Not principle. Arithmetic. In my market, at my price point, I have never needed one to fill the calendar — and the same data everyone cites to justify amenities is the data that says this is normal. AirDNA’s pool study found the revenue lift ranging from 12% to 73% depending on where the house is, and close to nothing in cold and rural markets. An amenity that transforms a Gatlinburg cabin can be dead money three states away.
What I do have is the cheap end of the list, in all four houses: a fire pit, a grill, string lights, board games, bocce. Every one of those sits inside the furnishing budget, and they are the things guests actually write about.
So the question is not “which amenities should I add.” It is these four, in order:
What the evidence supports
There is a claim that runs through most writing about furnishing budgets: spend below a certain figure and your property will underperform. It is repeated by design firms, setup companies and blogs, usually with a specific dollar threshold attached.
I went looking for the dataset behind it. There isn't one. No published study shows that furnishing under a given number causes worse occupancy or a lower nightly rate. Every version of the claim traces back to a company that sells design services.
What there is evidence for
PriceLabs analysed more than 10,000 listings across nine cities. Only 12% earned a high content quality score — and those listings were 35% more likely to outperform their local market. In Chicago, 72% of them beat their peers. Around 70% of listings used low-quality or poorly structured images.
That study measures photographs and listing content, not what the furniture cost. I think it is the closest honest proxy we have, for an obvious reason: a badly furnished room is very hard to photograph well. But it is a proxy, and I would rather say so than dress it up as proof that you need to spend $40,000.
The one category with real numbers behind it is amenities. AirDNA's hot tub study, across three-bedroom houses in six location types over twelve months, found an average nightly rate of $303 against $228 without — about 33% higher — and roughly $16,000 more revenue a year, against an install cost that starts near $2,000.
Even there, be careful what you take from it. Hosts who install hot tubs tend to run better properties generally, so some of that gap belongs to the property rather than the tub. The nightly-rate premium is the number worth quoting. The revenue multiples you see on design firms' sites are not.
The receipts
Beds, mattresses, sofas, lamps, sheet sets and skillets — 373 items across four houses I furnished and ran myself, plus every paint colour on the walls. Filter it by house or by room, and see how the same decision got solved four different ways.
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