The Twilight Zone of Home Staging

Santa Clause BARBARA, Calif. — On a late Friday evening I maneuvered into the carport of the weekend home in Santa Barbara that my accomplice and I have shared for the last couple of years — and enrolled the first in a progression of "Strange place"- ish stuns. The auto headlights cleared the glass sliders of our cutting edge house, enlightening a reconfiguration of the family room furniture so inquisitive, I half-suspected slippage on the Ventura Fault. 

I let myself in, flipped on a few lights, and found the room had been loaded with enough white moth orchids to stock a Home Depot nursery. Our bookshelves, then again, were to a great extent stripped, put something aside for the odd prong part or espresso mug. I advanced toward our room: more orchids, hung chenille tosses, piles of beautiful cushions. It resembled a suite at the Marriott.

As confusing (and baffling) as any of the increases to the rooms were the cancellations. The missing pieces incorporated the wistful (photos), the collectible (a Nakashima table) and the vital (the pooch bed).

Dee-dee, dee-dee; dee-dee, dee-dee. Submitted for your endorsement: You come back to your home to find it both is and isn't your home, a frightful residential test merging the well known and the abnormal, on the grounds that… your home has been arranged!

A couple of weeks prior, in the wake of acknowledging we weren't utilizing the spot as much as we had would have liked to, we had recorded it with a land operator in the zone. It was at our second meeting with the specialist that she tenderly raised the subject of having the house professionally zhooshed available to be purchased. The office routinely organized its properties, she let us know, utilizing the best stager as a part of town. Arranged houses ("cleaned up and depersonalized") sold quicker. They got more cash.

My first thought had been: I did my own zhooshing. I once spent a whole night (a deliberate, chardonnay-energized evening) finding the ideal spot in the house for a bit of earthenware the extent of a radish. I used to compose for Architectural Digest! I was going to let a more bizarre pimp my home with vanilla-scented candles and end table books tied down by amplifying glasses?

At that point I had a thought. Indeed, even our negligibly selected house held a couple of unessential things: My gathering of vintage haven magazines. My accomplice's Browning 20-gage shotgun (a present on his ninth birthday from his dad, utilized once). The little expressionist models our pug had made out of rawhide bites.

I spent a weekend boxing stuff and moving it to the carport.

After that, the rooms were as extra as haiku. A stager would need to reason that the main nonessential was herself.

At that point I met the Stager. A beautiful, conservative fair lady, the Stager had the sphinxlike demeanor of an insightful or a traditions officer. "What's the room with every one of the books for?" she asked, peering into our library. She continued to share her "50 percent principle" for bookshelves: "More than 50 percent of rack space committed to books measures up to mess."