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FeedStaging with Soul
Prepping this Crocus Hill house for sale didn’t mean erasing what makes it a home
Every Sunday morning while reading the New York Times, my husband hands the “Home” section over to me at some point and says, “Take a look at this.” The dwelling is invariably small, sleek, minimally furnished, modern, and gleaming (i.e., clean). In short, it is everything our house is not. “What do you think?” he says. Translation: Ready to move yet? ¶ We live in a clapboard house that’s big, cluttered, and filthy. Built in 1880 by my great grandfather, the house was the first in what he christened Crocus Hill, a new development on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The place looks and feels its age. The living room floor creaks and sags in the middle. So do all the other floors. We bought it when my grandmother died, mainly to keep it in the family. ¶ It was, in a word, outdated. The house had dodged the bullet of ’50s modernization—a good thing—but had last been remodeled in 1890. We got started soon after we moved in, tearing out walls, updating the plumbing, installing circuit breakers, replacing the roof, and giving the whole place a fresh coat of paint, inside and out. Heavy brocade draperies installed in the 1920s literally fell apart as they were carried to the dumpster with their Mrs. Haversham-style cobwebs. Underneath it all, we uncovered a beautiful house with floor-to-ceiling windows, wood floors, and three fireplaces.
But now our two daughters are grown. Mel, a terrier-bichon frise mix, whom my husband introduces to everyone as “my son,” doesn’t need three full floors (four if you count the basement) to romp around in. I decided I was ready to put the house up for sale. I knew it would be hard for me to leave the garden, but we’d buy a new small, sleek, minimalist cube in the country somewhere, maybe on a substantial meadow with a burbling creek running through it. Plenty of space for a garden.
Before. (After picture above.)
Photo by Danielle Gernes Photography
Our real estate agent, Laura Tiffany, suggested we ask designer Jay Nuhring, owner of reSee Design in New Prague, to stage our house—which is what you do to make a house look more appealing than perhaps it really is. Nuhring and I immediately hit it off. Kindred spirits, you might say. Nuhring is a big guy, with enthusiasm that matches his stature. To call him “can do” is a pathetic understatement. An architect by training, he says he always felt drawn to homes as opposed to houses—that buildings seem soulless to him without people and their stuff inside to bring them to life. He loved furniture, even as a kid, especially chairs, the most human of all human accessories, in his opinion. And mine. The day we met I apologized for my chair fetish. “No problem,” he said.
Nuhring strives to make the rooms he stages the opposite of what staging implies, which is, he says, “a kind of deception.” Rather, he revels in rearranging people’s things in a way that reveals their best qualities so that the rooms “tell a story.” Staging isn’t about banishing the seller so the buyer can mentally start over, Nuhring insists. It’s about demonstrating how well the space accommodates people, whomever they may be.
You might expect a home stager to bring in all new stuff and then pop some cookies in the oven. But Nuhring takes inventory of what he has to work with—props, if you will—sofas, pictures, books, vases, even dishes and flatware. My house struck him as a gold mine. Or so he said. Nuhring is a true gentleman and keenly aware that staging is a sensitive operation, a bit like open-heart surgery, if you’re as house-proud as I am. The morning he arrived I was exhausted, having been up all night fiddling with the living room curtains, erecting a new coffee table (I knew the existing one was far too small), and shoving extraneous throw rugs, lamps, and chairs into closets. The vacuum cleaner was splayed across the front hall. Books littered the floor. Dust seemed bent on clouding tabletops and bookshelves.
“Sorry. It’s an old house,” I said. “Hard to keep clean.”
“No problem,” he said.
This is what Nuhring always says when he is focused on bigger things like: Why are the sofas in the wrong place?
“Sorry about the windows,” I said, referring to the gray blotchy areas Mel had just pressed his nose against.
“No problem. They’re beautiful.”
He was now “flipping” the sofas, as he put it. The longer sofa went in front of the bay window, the shorter loveseat along the bookshelf. Instantly the room felt bigger, broader, less canyon-like. “A room doesn’t have to line up with the fireplace,” he said, as I babbled on incoherently about how I’d always assumed it did.
“The sofas are from Ikea,” I confessed, as if it mattered. “Mel won’t stay off the furniture so I just figured ....”
So why are they white? he must have been thinking. “No problem,” he said. “I love them. Tomorrow we go shopping.”
Nuhring grinned, as if to say we were going to have as much fun shopping as a pair of teenagers at the mall with their parents’ credit cards. Needless to say, we did. We headed to Great Estate Home and Garden, a warehouse in Minnetonka filled with treasures. We arrived to find it closed.
“No problem,” Nuhring said over his shoulder as he vanished around the corner, only to reappear inside the front door with the owner, who’d agreed to let us in even though he was getting ready for a big two-day sale. Nuhring had convinced him to sell me anything I wanted—anything at all—for the sale price. Uh-oh.
We made our escape with only a tall black torchere, a ceramic Japanese garden pot, a large mirror from India, a glass-topped library table, and an enormous burnished brass and crystal chandelier for the dining room—which Nuhring assessed as needing an immediate upgrade to put it “on par with the living room.”
Nuhring says the entry comes first when a house is staged to go on the market. “It creates an all-important first impression,” he says. “We can either exceed that initial expectation or disappoint. It sets the bar.”
My entry leads straight into a cozy den. The fireplace is the focal point. Above the mantel, Nuhring placed pictures, working the same magic with our accumulated hodgepodge of an art collection that he works with his own art. (In his other life as an artist, Nuhring makes huge compositions from sections of billboard ads.) So much for the notion that staging is about erasing all vestiges of the seller. Our new mantel is all about me and my husband. The things we love. And why we love them.
The denouement to this story isn’t what you might anticipate if you’re a Designed to Sell fan. Don’t call your broker if you’re looking for a pre-Victorian home in Crocus Hill. We’re not ready to put our house on the market just yet. We want to enjoy this place while it’s “brand new.” Photographer Danielle Gernes cemented that idea as she was packing up her lights and tripods. “So what if it’s big? You’re not going to find anything better.”
I took that as a compliment. Sometimes you just need someone else’s eyeballs to help you see your house for what it is. A home. And it doesn’t hurt to give it a good cleaning either.
Stagers' Secrets
“RESEE” YOUR OWN ROOMSby asking yourself what works and what doesn’t, not just design-wise but functionally. Do you really want that small cocktail table in the library? How about something bigger and taller you might actually use to spread out your books? And what’s with all those giant plastic coat hooks in the kitchen? A kitchen is not a mudroom. Get the boots and parkas out of there!
TAKE A GOOD LOOK at your furniture arrangement. Does it make the best use of the space? What happens if a few bigger pieces switch places? When stager Jay Nuhring flipped the sofas in my living room, the room immediately felt bigger and broader.
FORGET TRIED-AND-TRUE SOLUTIONS, especially if they’re not working in your rooms. So what if every living room in America is arranged with the fireplace as the focal point? That doesn’t mean yours has to be. Maybe a bay window would work better with the room’s proportions. Mine does.
DECLUTTERING ISN'T ALWAYS NECESSARY. Unless you’re hopelessly anal retentive, don’t assume an inviting room has every cushion in place and every “unnecessary” knickknack stowed away. To put out the welcome mat, your home must make it clear that humans dwell within. Yet. . . if you’re a pack rat like me, put away some of your treasures and bring them out another day.
PAIR BARGAINS AND FINE FURNITURE. My inner Scrooge was thrilled to find a kindred spirit in Nuhring when it came to some of my bargain finds. Why not combine sofas from Ikea with a fine antique desk if they look good together? But remember, the more unexpected and/or offbeat your décor, the trickier it is to get it just right.
CREATE AMBIENT GLOW WITH LAMPS. Especially in the living room, multiple lamps and other small lights are often preferable to overhead lighting. “People like to see the floor, and get a sense of the boundaries of the room, which can be hard with just overhead lighting,” says Nuhring. Extension cord still showing? Tuck it under the rug or run it along the molding.
WASH THE WINDOWS, polish the floors, touch up the nicked woodwork, dust the books, and organize those closets. Stagers do all of this immediately when called in to rejuvenate a house that’s going on the market. And what a difference it makes!
PAINT TO FRESHEN A TIRED SPACE. We painted our dining room a rich cranberry red a few weeks before Nuhring arrived. There’s nothing like a new color to help you “resee” your space.
—B.B.
Bonnie Blodgett, Midwest Home’s garden columnist, writes from her newly “reseen” office in her Crocus Hill home.
For more information on featured products and suppliers, pleases see our Buyer's Guide.
8 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
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