Living Room: Do As the Name Suggests

Learn To Live In Your Living Room

By Kit Davey
CTW Features

The realtors I work with ask me to provide staging advice for their homeowners, as they know their clients can benefit from a home-sale preparation plan, and because they feel more comfortable having me deliver the advice. Teaming up with the homeowner, we walk through the house and come up with a plan for simplifying and updating the house to maximize the selling price.

But in this case, the homeowners weren’t there. The house was going on the market in a few days, so I met the realtor to see what we could do in two hours. We decided to rearrange as much as we could, and make a list of further changes for the homeowners to implement on their own.

This small home had no formal entry and a difficult floor plan. On opening the front door you stepped into the middle of the living room, a major design flaw. Our goal was to create a spacious-looking, pulled-together living room while downplaying the home’s lack of a formal entry.

Before

• Walking into the side of a huge couch is not a great welcome for potential buyers (the front door is out of view to the right). The couch also was bisecting the room, making the space look much smaller than it actually was.

• The entertainment center, although a nice choice for concealing the TV, dominated the room and was not an ideal focal point.

• The odds and ends of furniture under the window looked choppy and a bit impromptu.

After

• We repositioned the couch under the window. This immediately opened up the room and made it more welcoming. (FYI, a couch will tend to look best when placed on the longest wall in the room.) We put a companion chair and ottoman, which had been sitting in the dining room for some reason, across from the couch to create a conversation area. You can’t see it in the photo, but we created a welcoming vignette by putting a little table with artwork above it near the chair. Now, when you open the front door you are greeted by a friendly “scene” instead of bumping into a chubby couch.

• In the short time we had to stage the house, we couldn’t remove the entertainment center. We left a note for the homeowner asking them to put it into storage, and to replace it with the upholstered bench and artwork. When a living or family room doesn’t have a fireplace as the focal point, you need to create one.

In this case, the framed picture and bench, although not ideal, worked better than the entertainment center as a simple focal point, because they were less bulky and added color to the room.

• The couch works much better under the window than the line-up of small furniture. Two of the four items were reused in the new arrangement, and the other items were packed away.

The homeowners loved the new arrangement when they returned home at the end of their workday. The house sold within days for more than the asking price.

Kit Davey, an interior designer based in Redwood City, Calif., helps clients redecorate their homes through the creative use of their existing furnishings. E-mail Kit your questions: kit@ctwfeatures.com

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