Very few of us live in a way that we would just be able to throw up a for sale sign and welcome people in — most of our homes require a bit of preparation before we come to market. And no matter the size or style or price point of a given property, the principles of home staging are always the same:
Clearly define the rooms and spaces
Scale down and scale back to increase the feel of spaciousness and improve flow
Lighten & brighten
Declutter and depersonalize
Clean!
I am going to be running a “miniseries” of posts, with real world examples of how my clients and I achieved each of these principles with their homes. This will be the first of five…
Staging principle #1 – Clearly define the rooms and spaces
The photo below is from a great loft condo in Cambridgeport I listed a couple years ago. With this type of open layout especially, it’s crucial to arrange furniture to create the “rooms” buyers expect in a home. In this case, my clients actually ate their meals at their kitchen breakfast bar (not shown here), but we wanted to show buyers a dining room, so we repurposed a large desk that normally lived in another room, added some chairs, and voila!
My client JM had a fantastic two bedroom condo in a historic Charlestown rowhouse. However, he was using the second bedroom as an office. There was also a bonus room off the master, which would have made a great office, being used as a gear storage room. Before listing, JM packed up and cleared out the storage room and we moved his office desk into the space.
We then able to do a very simple staging of the second bedroom as an actual bedroom by setting up an air mattress and bedside table.
The space in the picture below is an open “bonus area” at the top of a flight of stairs in a 3-level Cambridge townhome that my clients had never really figured out how to use, and by default turned into a toy room. Since we wanted to appeal to the widest audience, we thought it best to set the space up as a den or reading nook, which is what the professional stagers did here, by adding a couple comfy chairs, side table and rug. That turned it into valuable space for buyers viewing the home.
Stay tuned for the next post on scaling down & back next week!