Berkeley: All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

Home staging – or “dressing up an apartment so that it looks unfit for human habitation, but in a good way” as Rebecca Mead puts it in a recent New Yorker article – is something that mesmerizes me.

The practice hasn’t really taken off in the UK so I am still fascinated by the lengths that stagers go to to make a house more “buyer friendly”. (The one house I visited in London that had been staged showed just how much the profession had to learn. One of their touches was to install wall-to-wall fitted carpet in a curiously unappealing shade of blue — throughout the entire house. The effect was that once I left the house I could remember little about it except for that darned carpet.)

Here, my sister-in-law tells the story of the time she was selling her home in Berkeley and the buyers were more interested in negotiating a price for the two potted Bay trees outside the front door – placed there by stagers of course – than for the house itself.

At open houses in Berkeley I have seen patio tables laid for cocktail hour with wine and appetizers on display; a selection of plastic lemons artfully arranged next to an open cookbook flaunting a recipe for lemon tart; and a live musician strumming gentle melodies on his guitar under the wisteria in a house’s back yard.

I sound cynical but I do think there’s a role for stagers. Dressing up a house saves a potential buyer the mental effort involved in imagining how the house could become a home (whether it’s their home is another question). Bedrooms are improved by a beautifully made-up bed. Bathrooms are trickier: a few fluffy towels and a pretty potted orchid won’t detract from chipped tiles or damp stains.

I just think it’s important to be able to see through and beyond staging. We need to force ourselves to see the house stripped back to its bare bones. Because that’s certainly what it will be like on the day you move in.