case study two

Presenting the property to its best advantage; creating a lifestyle to encourage prospective buyers to mentally move in.

The initial meeting and brief:
The initial client meeting took place on site: a recently refurbished 4-bedroom property.
We walked through the property with the clients, discussing the spaces, the budget, the timescale and their ideal buyers.
There were numerous reasons for staging and styling this property to sell:

* a large unique Art Deco house with a contemporary flat roof which, as spectacular as it is, it is not to everyone's taste;
* the spacious ground floor had numerous reception rooms, which could be confusing to a viewer as the purpose for these rooms was unclear;
* the large rooms could be overwhelming to viewers e.g. what do you do with all that spaces?;
* the house was in a higher price bracket which raises expectations and limits the number of prospective buyers.

The concept:
We decided that it would be best to furnish and dress all the ground floor rooms to give each of them a purpose and demonstrate how to best use the expanse of space. Rather than dress all the rooms upstairs, we advised styling just two: the master suite to create maximum impact and the smallest bedroom to make sense of its unusual shape.

As we could fill an entire website with the details for the whole property, it was so big, we'll highlight and focus on two areas: the family room and the formal dining room.

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The scheme:

As the house was authentically Art Deco, it would have been a sin not to include the influence of that period in the styling. However, as the developer hoped to reuse the furniture and furnishings in further properties once this one sold, we added a flavour of Art Deco with a modern twist.

The Family Room

The family room, open to the kitchen, was a large expanse of white walls, white marble tiled floors and gorgeous original stained glass windows. All the hard and white surfaces made the space cold and clinical. Adding warm colours and textures made it more inviting. An empty open plan living is often hard for viewers to visualise. Zoning and dressing each area within the large space demonstrates suitable furniture and creates the lifestyle encouraging prospective buyers to mentally move in. To save on the budget, we decided not to dress the stained glass windows as they were such a beautiful original period feature. Instead we added a striking feature wall and artwork to draw the eye upwards and break up the white expanse.

The Formal Dining Room

The Art Deco influence was more pronounced in this room as it was open to the hallway featuring a magnificent oak-panelled staircase. Again, as an empty room it was undefined, so we gave it a purpose: a welcoming formal dining room. We found the perfect furniture, lighting, curtain fabric, wallpaper and accessories to complement the Art Deco style.

Once the scheme proposal had been approved by the client, the orders were placed albeit with a couple of substitutions due to stock availability, delivering the wallpapers and light fittings direct to site for their tradespeople to install. Then, on a nominated day the Design Fix install team brought and positioned all the furniture and furnishings, taking away all the packaging. Dressing an empty property for the sales market to this high standard usually take one to two days depending on the size of the property.

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