Use Accessories Wisely When Preparing Your Home to Sell | Martha Stanton-Smith | May 3, 2009 (revised June 23, 2008)
Accessories tell the story of the room. They can make the room feel formal or casual. They can transform it from elegant to ethnic.
When you are decorating a home for living, the accessories express your personality. When trying to sell, you must allow the buyer to imagine himself living there and putting his own personality into the room. So, you have to depersonalize. Put away the family photos. Be careful of accessories that might offend some people, for example stuffed dead animals. Tone down the overdone theme rooms and weed out the collections. Remember you're selling your house, not your stuff, so don't let the stuff be distracting.
Area rugs anchor conversational groupings of furniture. Don't float them by themselves in the middle of a room with no furniture to relate. Even the doormat has its door.
Size is always a good question, but when in doubt, go larger. In a living room arrangement, the rug should at least go from the front of the couch over to the front of the opposing seating, preferably right under. In a dining room, If you even use one, the rug should be large enough so that when you pull the chairs out there is still 6" more rug and they are not in danger of going off the edge. And that doormat should be the largest you can fit in your foyer.
After you have placed your furniture in the best positions to accentuate the selling features, situate your lighting. Generally three lamps in a triangle around the room work to spread the light evenly. Lamps are a functional accessory. Consider where it makes sense to have light for tasks,like reading, dining, applyhing make-up. They are also a decorative accessory. Consider their style, including the shades, because will become part of the 'tablescape' wherever you place them.
Your wall finishes and furniture will have started a colour scheme. Accessories are a good way either to reinforce those colours or to liven things up with contrasting accents. When you are bringing in an accent colour through use of accessories, bear in mind that you want to have the color repeating in at least three places evenly spread throughout the room. Make sure you have enough items in shades of that colour to do it, for example at least two cushions and a matching throw for the living room.
Normally we hang art to relate to the furniture beneath it. The bottom of a picture should be 6" - 9" above the back of the sofa, definitely no more than 10". Pictures or groupings should take up about two thirds as much wall space as does the furniture piece over which they are hung. If a mirror or picture hung over a table or console is too small, you can arrange tall objects on the table underneath the picture to fill the gap visually.
Choose art for the focal point of the room first. Make the best statement possible. Then work your way around the room from left to right. When you imagine a line around the room connecting the tops of the art, accessories or furniture, that imaginary line should vary up and down around the room, but it must be a gradual variation, not a roller coaster ride for the eye. You can place wall art to smooth the height variations.
When we step into a room, we naturally 'read' it from left to right like a book so always leave something pleasing to the eye in the right hand corner of the room. Don't worry if there are some blank spaces. Some home stagers suggest you should always leave one wall with nothing on it and I often do.
Regarding height to hang artwork, the centre of the piece should be at eye level, but nobody said whose eye level. I would say 54" to 59" from floor to the middle of the picture should work for most. However, if you are normally viewing the work while seated, place it lower.
If you are hanging pictures in pairs or groups, the width of your palm is a good space to leave between pieces 12" x 18" or larger. Smaller ones go closer together.
Compose picture groupings on the floor before you start hanging. The overall shape of the grouping should fall roughly into a geometric shape such as a rectangle, triangle, square or circle. Items in the group should have some relationship to each other whether it be colour or subject. Frames can be all the same or a mixture. Spread the lights and darks and various colours throughout the grouping for balance.
You can use art placement to alter proportions. Rectangular pictures placed horizontally will widen the wall. A tall vertical picture beside a tall vertical furniture piece will seem to add width to the furniture.
Repeating shapes is a good look, for example, if you have a round wreath over the mantle, flank it with a plate to repeat the round shape.
Unexpected art placement sometimes works very well, too. Try a picture between the top of the lamp table and the bottom of the lampshade. Instead of a large picture over your headboard, you could use smaller pictures over your night tables.
Mirrors are great for expanding space and reflecting light into a room. They work well for bringing in light if placed at 90 degrees to the window. But, remember to consider what they will reflect, not just their frame, before deciding on their placement. For example, be careful about leaning a mirror on the mantle because it will only reflect the ceiling.
The more formal you want your room to look, the more symmetrical you should make your accessory arrangements. Things should be in pairs, identical on each side. For a more casual feeling in the room, use asymmetrical arrangements, non-matching pairs or maybe odd numbers of items. I often find groups of three are pleasing to the eye.
In small rooms, use accessories with detail that can be appreciated best when viewed close up. In large rooms, use larger pieces that provide drama when viewed from farther back.
Many small items look much 'busier' than one larger accessory. If all you have to work with are small items, contain them on trays so they will appear visually as one larger item. The objects in the arrangement should have some relationship to each other. And, remember to group in odd numbers.
If you have a collection spread all over the house, you can gather a few of the best together to make more impact. But, be careful. Less IS more. 901 widgets was not the odd number we were looking for. The trouble with collections for staging is that they become personal and draw the viewers thoughts away from the house to the impressive collection.
Think 'triangles' when you are arranging items on tables. The rough outline of the group as you normally view it should be a triangle. It could be an equal sided triangle or a right angled triangle. Vary the shapes, tall and short, wide and narrow. Unify them by selecting items of the same materials or in the same colours. If some of your items are not as tall as you'd like, try raising them by placing them on nice hard cover books with the dust jackets removed.
When creating tablescapes and shelf arrangements for a home you are selling, don't completely fill up the space. Arranging items on shelves should be regarded as an artistic pursuit rather than exercise in engineering to see how much mass they can hold. Keep lots of open space. If you can still see the backs of the shelves, they won't make the room seem smaller.
Keep a zigzag pattern in mind for the arrangement of your books on shelves. Organize them in little groups of similar size and colour. Place a few on each shelf. Vary the position of the highest, putting put the highest on the right on one shelf, and on the left on the next shelf. If the shelves are wide, you can put the height in the centre of some. Put some books on their sides and some upright. You can create a focal point by leaving a larger open space in the centre and placing a dramatic accessory there.
Usually book spines face out, but I saw an interesting picture the other day where all the books were reversed so you saw only the edges of the pages. It wouldn't be much fun for a librarian, but it was great for the decorator because automatically all the books looked very similar in colour and texture and very un-busy. As they say, rules were made to be broken. If all you have to work with is a bunch of paperbacks, perhaps you could try it.
Leave about half of the shelf space book free. Put in a few other accessories in these spaces to add colour and interest and to compliment the feel or theme of your room. Vases, bowls, candles, boxes, baskets, and sculpture all work. Plants, pictures and mirrors work too.
Accessories are the stager's tool to make subtle suggestions to the buyer. For example, a book and eyeglasses on a table or chair instantly say, 'you can enjoy some quiet time reading here.' A cocktail shaker or ice bucket and some glasses on a tray say, 'you can entertain here.' A chess set with a game in play says, 'whoever lives here is smart.' Fluffy towels and nice bath products say 'you can pamper yourself in this bathroom.' Accessories in current colours say, 'this house is kept up to date.'
Use your accessories wisely to say what the buyers want to hear!