Housing is very expensive. Furnishings are expensive. The mats to craft furnishings are expensive. The patterns to craft furnishings are expensive. There is no way around that that I've found.

By purple and gold, are you referring to the rarity of the furnishings? There are many blue and green quality furnishings that are quite nice, too.

I agree with SilverBride, housing is an incredibly expensive undertaking. I'm pretty sure I spent the most real money and also in-game money on housing than anything else. It's good to prepare for long-term goals.

Starting with smaller houses that are cheaper can be a good start as well as the nicer free homes that they occasionally give out. If they want a specific home the Crown Store is needed just for the structure of specific homes themselves depending on interests. Since they are a new player, starting with the Alinor inn room or the $5 Villa are probably the most realistic places to start since buying Alinor Townhouse is a big feat for a new player and even if they had done the zone, it's probably out of their gold range.

Doing a lot of gathering is good advice - I'm at the point now where I have some pages to craft some things I want but no mundane runes or the other rare mats. I'd advise using those sparingly on high-end furnishings.

What can be helpful is reviewing all the stuff you can buy in the Crown Store while decorating. You can see a ton of furnishings and what they look like and preview-placement so you know how large or small something is in advance. Then google those housing items to see how you can get it with in-game money through crafting or the stores around town.

The gold and purple question I would also wonder if they mean that as a color scheme, or if they meant the quality of the furnishings. Unlike gear we wear, quality for furnishings doesn't always make sense for what the furnishing is. There are amazing green-quality furnishings that are also very expensive.

Probably knowing the sources would be a good start. I'm probably going to forget a couple but here goes:

1. Furnishing plans from the zones: really iffy because heavily RNG dependent. Persistence pays off in the long run, however, so leave no container unlooted. These will be mostly green plans with occasional blues and purples. Purples have a substantial cooldown, I think, but any cooldowns for blues and greens are much shorter. The "Homemaker" perk in the Craft Tree can be helpful (low chance, but still higher than zero). I occasionally get plans dropping from daily crafting writs.
2. Furnishing plans from Faustina Curio (Master Writ vendor): If "Unsurpassed Crafter" has been completed, she'll have a folio of the gold plans from each zone for 800 vouchers. Hlaalu had these individually when the chapter/zone was new, but they're bundled now. She also has RNG-based blue (20 vouchers) and purple (50 vouchers) single-plan folios. There are roughly 120 total plans in those two pools for most zones.
3. Furnishings from the furnishers in the relevant zone
4. Furnishings from the Luxury Goods furnisher in The Hollow City on weekends. That source rotates weekly, so it will probably be a while if you're wanting stuff from a particular zone.
5. Furnishings from the Housing Editor: crowns only
6. Furnishings from the Crown Store: crowns only
7. Furnishings from Antiquities, usually Advanced, Master, and Ultimate leads, sometimes in fragments which need to be assembled. I don't recall any green or blue leads that drop furnishings for placement; those are usually for selling.

A lot of that can be picked up from guild traders, either the plans or the furnishings, often both.

Most zones have furnishings which can be picked up by fishing, but those are often acquatic-themed. Many achievements will unlock stuff from the achievement furnisher in each zone. Completing all codex entries for a furnishing almost always unlocks it for purchase from the achievement furnisher.

Also don't forget that themed stuff isn't necessarily single-zone. Alinor/Summerset can be combined with Altmer styles or Elsweyr/Dragonhold stuff can be combined with Khajiit. If crowns aren't a concern, buying furnished houses and cannibalizing the furnishings can be useful, but it's a pricey way to approach the problem.

Aside from those, don't forget that "farm mats" and "decon everything" (or substantial Bank balances) will be needed for furniture crafting, both for furnishing mats and for style mats.

There's no fast or inexpensive path to take. Regardless which style a new player decides to start with.

My particular strategy was amassing writ vouchers, and using them to purchase the furnishing folios of the style I was after from Rollis Hlaalu or Faustina Curio. Keeping what I needed and selling duplicates on the guild traders (sometimes for a net profit). This required generating a lot of master writs and/or gold to purchase writs. But it was a more direct method to obtain what I was looking for, and much much cheaper than if I had purchased those same furnishing plans directly from the guild traders. Plans typically sell on the traders for at least twice the average cost per writ voucher, so it's cheaper to buy master writs for the vouchers.

I'd suggest starting with a small home as they're easier to fill when you have very little furniture.

Then look up what places or racial styles will suit the chosen theme. Sometimes there is a racial style and some related locations that have furniture that matche it for example. It definitely helps to look up the different furniture to find what styles are called so they can search guild traders for them.

If they can preview the house furnished too, that will let them see any other style names the devs used that might suit the property. It's also a good way to get an idea of what sorts of furniture is needed and how the space can be used.

Then look at guild traders or the TTC and just get some basics that should be quite cheap, but let them play around with decorating. Get some clutter and deco items too rather than just the furniture - food, art, rugs, vases, plants etc. Antiquities can be added for interest too. But get the basic furniture in so it feels homely. Don't blow the whole budget on a single bed

Once they have the basics in place, it's worth finding out where any desired plans/furniture can be acquired at source before they spend a lot buying it.

The Infinite Archive resets with 3 new furniture patterns every Tuesday but they cost fortunes, so players need to run the IA to get those. Some of these patterns are very expensive to purchase from traders, etc. so well worth it.

Also, the containers around the IA merchants often contain furnishing patterns.

I think one thing newer players underestimate with housing is just how expensive even a “normal” themed house becomes once you move beyond an inn room.

Even though my main character can craft almost everything herself at this point, most of my proper builds (character homes) will still comfortably eat 2 million gold or more by the time they are actually finished. Sometimes far more if structural pieces, lighting, rare plans, or luxury furnishings are involved.

And honestly, that is with:

crafting capability,
years of accumulated plans,
materials already stockpiled,
and experience knowing where to save money.

My advice to newer decorators would honestly be:

Start small.
Pick a clear theme.
Limit your colour palette.
Do not try to fill every slot.
And build atmosphere first, not item count.

Some of the nicest houses in ESO are just:

good lighting,
believable furniture placement,
a few plants,
some clutter,
and a sense that somebody actually lives there.

A stable, a kitchen table, a reading chair, a cat wandering upstairs — those details matter more than throwing 500 expensive glowing objects into a room. More is not always best.

Housing gets much easier once you stop trying to “finish” a house and instead let it evolve naturally over time.

Taarente wrote: »

eat 2 million gold or more

As an aside, in my RP circles we sometimes laugh that setting up a dinner table with plates, utensils, and a variety of food can sometimes cost upwards of 500K gold lol.

I'm amazed how fast my money is flying out the window on my latest house. It's far more expensive than it even looks, tiny gold-guilded sugar bowls add up fast.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

When I first got into housing, I looked at all the small houses in base game areas to see which one I liked best. I had certain qualities I wanted, like an outside courtyard instead of just the house. I wanted to put the basic crafting stations outside the house so I needed room for that. I settled on Twin Arches, a Redguard style house. I did not have many Redguard themed housing plans learned, and those are very desirable and more pricey that others and the really nice ones are purple quality. My main character and crafter was a Khajiit, and I knew more of those style plans and they were much cheaper in guild traders so I decorated in that style and it became a home away from home for her. Much later I came back and redecorated the house in proper Redguard style when I learned those plans.

It took me quite a while to earn enough gold to buy that first house, but I did not have a guild trader to sell things and I did not farm furnishing plans like I did later. You can speed up the process by doing both.

The main hurdles for me early on were having enough purple improvement mats to craft furnishings. Starting out you need to do materials farming to get the furnishing mats themselves and also refine mats like ore, wood, cloth, and jewelry to get those improvement mats. Having multiple characters doing daily crafting writs can help with that too.

EDIT: typo

Yes well said. Most if not all of us that enjoy housing started with decorating our inn rooms and learning green and blue furnishing rscipes and then moved on from there. You can't just jump from zero to a million without making the journey unless you have so much gold or crowns that you can buy everything ...but what is the fun in that?