www.carolineandtony.com

Staging

March 19th, 2006 Caroline

When Tony and I were house-hunting a few years ago, we quickly learned to tell which houses were professionally staged. They weren’t just impossibly neat; they were the houses without shades or blinds (to let the maximum light into the house); without family photos (to let potential buyers picture themselves in the house); and without much furniture (to make the place look bigger). Which is not to say these staged homes are completely spare. My favorite touch was in one master bedroom, where the nightstand held a pale blue Tiffany box, its ribbon untied, the lid half off. “If you buy this house,” the box seemed to whisper, “You, too, will receive jewelry in bed.”

It was a nice fantasy, but not our house. The one we ultimately bought was staged with paint colors so good we redid them after our renovation this year, but the owner also prevailed on the stager to keep the funky 50s ceiling fixture in just one room (all the others were replaced with Ikea ), a sign of how past inhabitants had lived.

This month we sold Tony’s mom’s house, so we’ve seen the other side of staging. The stagers like Tony’s dad’s paintings and decorated around them with a modern look. They furnished the bedrooms with narrow beds to make the rooms look bigger, and set the tables for an imaginary meal: stacked at each setting were a charger, two plates, and a wineglass with a napkin inside. “But where does the food go, Mama?” Ben quite reasonably asked.

Meanwhile back in San Francisco, we’d invited the woman who sold us our new cabinets to come take pictures of the remodelled kitchen for her portfolio. Since she did as much, if not more, work on the kitchen design than the architect did, it was an easy offer. We cleaned the kitchen, even wiped down the cabinet faces, then got out of the way as she and her colleague made our kitchen their own. Toaster oven, bread box, cookie jar (sadly empty): gone! Knife block and espresso machine could stay, but the espresso macine was unplugged (?) and the bean grinder was banished. Our basket of fruit was replaced by a more artful arrangement of pretty much the same fruit, though theirs was dominated by a large pineapple. A colander of fresh tomatoes made sense to me, but the pair of water glasses, each holding a whole lime? Not sure what that’s about.

Still, if you want to make your kitchen look good for an hour, take all the cooking stuff away!

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