Spaces

By Alan M. Petrillo
Photography By Donna Sanchez

With the housing market in the dumps, homeowners and real estate agents are resorting to creative methods to make houses more noticeable and appealing to potential buyers, with many sellers turning to home stagers for help.

Stagers put the seller's house under a hawk's-eye view and remake the interior so it has the appeal of a pristine model home.

Phyllis Schulman of Wow Staging and Home Entertainment in Northwest Tucson has staged homes from $100,000 tract houses to Foothills mansions fetching $3.5 million. “One of the goals of staging an empty house is to make it look like someone lives there without giving the house a cluttered feeling,” Schulman says. “When a house is empty, buyers often don’t have the vision of how furniture would lay out in a room or how much to put in, or even the style.”



Schulman, who’s been “faking” interiors for eight years, currently has a dozen houses staged. “Each house is custom staged,” she says. “If there’s a lot of tile or hardwood flooring, I’ll put area rugs down to soften them. I try to blend my furnishings with the style of the house because the house should be the focal point, not the furnishings.”

Nancy Farina, owner of California Design Center/Studio C Interiors in Oro Valley says the scale of furnishings put into a staged home often is the most important decision. “You have to compare the size of the furniture with the volume of the room,” Farina says. “You want to put as few statement pieces in a room as possible to make it look lived in, but not cluttered. There should be a little bit of minimalism going on in the house. This is a case where less is more.”



Along with bringing in new furnishings, stagers make sure that clutter is removed, family photos tucked away, and unneeded furniture stored elsewhere. If the house has an unusual decorating style, a stager typically will recommend making changes that will make the home appeal to the widest buyer base.

Farina points out that a stager’s aim is for a clean, crisp and open look that enables buyers to see themselves living in the house.

Another consideration when creating a special feel for a home is the usage of color. “It depends on the particular home as to how you approach it. Some stagers have been successful in using strong colors to make a room memorable,” remarks Farina. “But most take a more subdued approach to try to appeal to a wider range of buyers.”



Kelly Shannon of Premier Staging Design in Oro Valley, who got into the business after decorating for friends, makes sure that the room nearest the entryway is a show stopper. “The buyer is forming an opinion of the house based on the first five seconds, so [the first room they walk into] is the key room,” Shannon says.

Shannon generally doesn’t stage an entire home, instead focusing her efforts on the areas most important to buyers: main room, master bedroom, kitchen and bathrooms.



As varied as home prices are, so is the cost of staging. Costs can be as little as $500 or as much as $5,000 or more. Contracts typically are structured on a month-to-month or quarterly basis with the realtor and homeowner often splitting the cost.

“This isn’t a new concept but it’s gotten legs in this economy,” Farina says, “because it pays for itself.”

About the only issue with staging is wondering why you didn’t have your house looking so nice while you were still living in it.