Just what is home staging?

“Style is the perfection of a point of view.” — Richard Eberhard (1904-2005), American poet

As most of my readers know, I am a home stager and have been for many years. It’s interesting to me that often when the subject comes up, people are not totally sure what that means.

So let me see if I can add a little clarity. There are many sides to the staging endeavor and here’s my take on most of them.

I didn’t know what it was called at the time, but I started “rearranging” people’s furniture when I was a very young woman. Not for money, not for anything. I would just be at friends’ houses and all of a sudden it would occur to me: “Wow, that would look better over there.” Or “this doesn’t fit in this room and shouldn’t it go somewhere else?” Sometimes people liked it and sometimes they wondered why this crazy person was rearranging their furniture.

Oh well, we all get those reactions from people sometimes, right? Right?

So I said there were several types of home staging. Let’s take the first and most common.

People have lived in their homes for a while, plan to stay and are just plain tired of what they see every day. They can’t afford a whole new house of furniture and really do like most of their stuff; but they’re bored with it, or pieces just don’t work for them anymore.

Enter a home stager. A home stager simply looks at a situation through different eyes. As most will agree, thank goodness, we all have different tastes and ideas of how things should be. I won’t even go into what our world would be like if we were all alike.

So back to staging. When I go into a home I see it the way I think it should be or the way I would like to see it. That may or may not fit with the homeowner’s ideas but it gives us a place to start. Giving people ideas about how their space can be different is a passion of mine, and I’m certainly not saying I’m always right or that my way is the best — it’s just an option.

Working with homeowners is so much fun and, when they get into it, it’s amazing how excited and happy they get. Many will say I never knew it could be like this or I had no idea what to do with that. It makes me very happy and usually it all ends well.

Staging can involve simply talking about change. It can involve moving furniture and accessories. It can involve rehanging art or rearranging collections. It must eventually end up making the homeowner happy and loving where they live. That’s the ultimate goal. Because as any good designer or stager will tell you, it’s the homeowner’s house, not ours.

As we get a little older, lots of folks downsize. Raising a family in a large home is standard but when children are grown and gone, or people just don’t want all that space, they turn to smaller spaces. They may have loved all the stuff in their bigger home, but, alas, this space is not as big so all of that furniture just won’t fit.

A good stager can help them pick out their favorite pieces and get them installed in their new smaller home. It’s home. They love their possessions and feel comfortable in their new smaller place.

One of the most difficult and painful experiences for a lot of homeowners is selling their homes. For whatever reason, a move is imminent. Some want a smaller space or a different neighborhood. Some are moving to assisted living or independent living spots.

Before any home is put on the market, staging is essential. While most of us love our homes and all of our stuff, chances are we have too much stuff, and, let’s face it, it’s our home and we live in it the way we want to. Well, people looking to buy that house may not want to live in it like you do, and they need the house to look like it would be one they could live in comfortably.

At times, homeowners and stagers don’t totally agree on decor when it’s time to sell. If you have multiple collections, tons of furniture, gobs of stuff in your kitchen or bathrooms, this can be a turn off for a potential buyer.

My favorite thing to say to a homeowner who is getting ready to sell is: “When you put your home on the market, it really isn’t your home anymore.” It’s a place where strangers are going to roam around and try to make a decision on buying. They will be thinking: Can I live here? Will my furniture fit? How could I make this space work for me?

Staging before these strangers come in is key. And as I said, sometimes homeowners love their displays and don’t understand why they can’t leave them. Well, they’re not for sale — the house is — and that’s not what a potential buyer came to see.

Your home must be arranged so that any potential homeowner could walk in and say, “Oh I see how my things would fit in here. I just love it. This could go here; we could do that in there,” and so on. A lot of buyers don’t have the vision that a stager or designer may have, and they have to get a good picture of how they could live in that space.

These are just ideas of how stagers can be of use to homeowners. I also work with real estate agents.

When they get a new listing, sometimes homeowners and agents will disagree on what should be done to get the house ready for a showing, and it’s easier to have an outsider come in and work with the homeowner.

Stagers come in and leave. Real estate agents and homeowners will have that strong relationship until the home sells. They need to like each other.

The other part of working with a real estate agent or homeowner who has a house on the market is staging an empty house. Yes, as you know, there are a lot of them on the market.

When potential homebuyers see an empty house, they are sometimes at a loss as to what they would do with it. What kind of furniture? What would I do with this room? Would this work? A million questions.

So I do work with real estate agents to “stage” a home so those potential buyers will have an idea of what the house would look like. I have furniture and accessories available to use for that purpose. It’s amazing how much faster a house will sell when “staged.”

So there are a lot of facets to home staging. People have different reasons for wanting someone else to take a look into their personal space.

So for me, being allowed into people’s homes and being given the opportunity to give my opinions and assistance is a wonderful thing. It’s made me very happy over the years and I hope to continue along this path for a long time to come.

Contact me if you have any questions or would like to share a staging experience.

Carolyn Muse Grant is a founder and past president of the Architectural &Decorative Arts Society, as well as an interior design consultant/stylist specializing in home staging. Send questions to creativemuse@cox.net.