Using Fine Art in Home Staging

Interesting twist on home staging - using fine art as a touch of class. I think this could be overused, especially if the pieces don't match the house or over power it.

Food for thought, though!
Rebecca


Home Is Where the Art Is
Realtors increasingly use painting, sculpture to help sell houses.
By Sue Peters

It was not the fine taste of the seller I was being seduced by, but that of the home stager—the person who decorates empty houses in order to make them more appealing to buyers, theoretically increasing the selling price. Home staging is a trend that's been around at least 10 years in the hot real-estate markets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is now keeping up to 20 different enterprises in business here in Seattle. Using original art rather than inexpensive pastoral prints is the newest twist.

"In my approach to staging, a lot of it is reaching people on a subliminal level, and I think art really does that," says Sewell, who charges anywhere from $2,800 to $15,000 to spiff up a house, depending on the size of the space she needs to transform.

Another beneficiary of the growing trend in home staging and one of Sewell's main sources for art is Seattle Art Museum's Rental Sales Gallery, which both sells and rents original work from local galleries. "That [business] has increased spectacularly," says gallery director Barbara Shaiman. Sewell is probably Shaiman's biggest client.

While Sewell claims that staging "makes [sellers] a ton of money," she can't put an empirical value on the service she offers. But she has anecdotal evidence of houses that stagnated on the market and then suddenly became the objects of bidding wars once she'd stepped in.

Whatever the case, adding real art to the faux decor of home staging creates another venue for artists to make a bit of money from their work, at least in rentals, and allows the public to see art more easily. A tour of weekend open houses in any of Seattle's trendier urban neighborhoods might yield some special discoveries. And home buyers do sometimes have the option to buy the work along with the house. Reminds Shaiman, "If you buy the house and like the piece, it's worth asking."

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