Home stagers decorate a house in hours. Here are their tips for yours

At 12:30 p.m. on a Monday, a rowhouse on a leafy street in Northeast Washington is completely empty. Less than five hours later, the three-bedroom residence brims with furniture, art and the kinds of baubles that make a house feel like a home: neatly folded hand towels in the bathroom, a dinosaur-shaped planter in the kids’ bedroom, an open backgammon board on the family room table.

What happened in between? Michelle DeLucia, owner of Sub Urban Staging and Design, came from a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Silver Spring, Maryland, with two colleagues, three movers and enough stuff to make the space alluring for real estate photos and potential buyers. Then, they spent the afternoon transforming the row house.

Rather than appealing to the specific tastes of one client, home stagers must make a space as enticing to as many people as possible. They want to ensure that buyers feel wowed online and in person, or at least prevent them from scrolling to another listing after mere seconds. There are certain tricks of the trade that simply won’t apply to people who are decorating their own spots — you probably won’t be steaming your bed skirts and bathroom towels on a frequent basis, for instance, as DeLucia and her team do — but many stager tricks and tips do apply to nesters. Here are eight.

Pick a foundational item for each room

It’s tough to know where to begin when staring at an empty room. “You pick that one thing,” DeLucia says. “Is it the rug you got in Morocco? Is it a sofa that was passed down that you had recovered or whatever? Start from that, and then you build. And everything else just kind of falls into place because you have started building on something you love.” That’s how she approaches staging each room: A piece of artwork or something else that’s eye-catching lays the foundation for all the other items to follow.

If you’re feeling stymied, look to your home itself for inspiration. Alex Hermes, an expert stager at Bella Staging in Charlotte, says stagers often get knocked for using only neutrals. While that works in some spaces, “each home has its own unique personality,” she says. “You can look at different aspects of the house, the year it’s built, the color scheme.” For a recent staging of a midcentury house, Hermes says, “instead of trying to modernize that too much, we just played into it with bright colors and things that were relevant in that era.”

It’s all about scale

DeLucia likes to have a large sofa to show off the possibility of a room, but she and her team also have their eyes peeled for how a big piece of furniture or even the placement of an end table could prevent a closet door from fully opening, or how it feels to walk through the room from each entrance.

Ashley Stout, co-owner of Sizzle Home Staging in Chicago, keeps this in mind, too, when she’s trying to figure out if the furniture is to scale for the room. “Is it going to affect the natural flow from one space to another?” she says. “You don’t want to limit your access to a door or a closet. You don’t want it to be blocking some window that’s giving you fantastic natural light.”

Do not fear the tchotchke

DeLucia’s stagings include a bevy of baubles. She thinks of accessories as a way to tell a story and to make a space feel like home. She’s picked up many of them on her travels, such as a little stuffed alpaca from a trip to Peru, but many of the gewgaws come from big-box stores, too. Her team always brings a bunch of faux plants, in varying styles and sizes of planters, to breathe life into each room.

There’s a trick to making it all work: “Mixing materials is really important to create a space that feels like you’ve cultivated that look over time,” she says. And it’s OK if you’re not quite sure how to arrange them all at first. DeLucia often futzes with them until the configuration feels right.

There are some moments to blow your budget

You should budget out how much you’d like to spend on any given item. But Barbara Webb, owner of Webb Home Staging in Nashville, says there are moments when she sees something special, and the budget goes “out the window.”

“I see something that’s a key piece or unusual, and I know I can use it over and over again, I will grab that sometimes no matter what the price tag is,” Webb says. “Because I know it’s going to make the key element that just makes that space so much fun and rise above other spaces.” (Of course, do this responsibly.) Webb avoids trendy pieces, though, because she see doesn’t see those as a good investment.

If you want to invest in a trend, start small

If you do want to try a new decor trend, begin with an item like an accent pillow before you dive into the deep end with a pricier piece. Webb looks at pillows and thinks, “I can afford to change that out all day long,” she says, whereas she keeps the sofas more neutral.

Take your time

DeLucia’s warehouse has approximately 30 sofas, 50 headboards and more than 100 lamps, along with a full wall of pillows. There are, inevitably, some items she views as mistakes. The key thing they have in common is that she bought them in desperation. She needed them stat and didn’t have time to really consider whether they’d be a good long-term fit for her work. Unlike house stagers, you don’t have to fill up your entire home in mere hours. Try to avoid buying big-ticket items in a rush.

Don’t be afraid to give your rooms multiple purposes

Take advantage of the various nooks and crannies in your home. For stagers, this is a way of showing buyers a new possibility. But for you, it could expand how useful a room is. “If you don’t have a dedicated office but you can fit a little desk on the side of a space in your living room, you’ve just added another dimension,” Stout says. And just because a room has been a dining room in the past doesn’t mean you have to keep it that way if that’s not how you live.

Stout sometimes sees people limit themselves “based on the assumed, the obvious function of the room, but you can either make it multipurpose or you can give it an entire different function that works.”

Hang the art last

DeLucia and her team wait until they’ve arranged every other element before they hang up the art. (Yes, they use a hammer and nails — it’s in the contract.) They already have one big piece planned for each room, along with supporting players, but want to ensure everything else is in place before they start putting holes in the walls. You don’t want to center a painting on a table, only to then move the table seven inches.

The first wall that people see when they enter a room always gets serious attention. But not everything DeLucia hangs costs a fortune. She turns small items, such as a textile or postcard from travel, or a fabric sample, into wall art by framing them with nice matting.

How to make a move

It helps to think about the movability before you pull the trigger on any large piece of furniture. When Stout stages spaces with tight stairwells or third-floor walk-ups, she uses sofas with a slimmer profile. For young people who are likely to move many times, she recommends “thinking about the portability of the pieces that you’re buying, just (to) give it a longer life span for you as you move into different properties throughout your life.”

If you’re lucky, your moving days are few and far between. Not so for DeLucia, who has four this week. So she and her team have hammered out how to make each one as painless as possible. They load big items like couches and beds into the moving truck first, and put rugs in last. That way, the rugs come off the truck before anything else, and the team can lay them down before they move in large pieces of furniture. They also ensure that they’ve plugged in all the lamps before placing furniture that might block needed outlets.

“Sometimes it’s poetry in motion,” DeLucia says.