Home Stagers should not fear luxury homes
Home stagers, especially those who have not been in the home staging business very long, often fear being asked to stage a luxury home. If they don’t live in one themselves and didn’t grow up in a wealthy family, it’s natural to worry that they won’t know what to do.
My first home staging project was in one of the most expensive areas of the city. When I heard the neighborhood it was in and the fact that they would also need furniture to complement what they had, I was instantly terrified.
I have only lived in modest homes, did not grow up wealthy, and would not know a Louise XVI from a desk, chair, etc. of Queen Anne.
So I went into my first prep date thinking “I’ll be detected as an impostor at any moment and kicked out.”
That might have been what I was thinking, but I certainly didn’t let it show. I rehearsed various things that I might say to the client in the car on the road. For example, how would you describe my process for organizing your home, how furniture rentals worked, etc. All the kinds of things I now teach my students only there was no one to teach me back then, so I learned it the hard way!
Imagine my surprise when I walked into the million dollar home to find things like flipped plastic milk crates for end tables in the master bedroom. Remember this was an “executive house” in one of the more expensive neighborhoods.
With the experience that comes with visiting thousands of houses in many different cities and having personally set up hundreds of them in the last 7 years as a home stager, I’ve realized: hardly anyone lives the way you see in Architectural Digest, rich people not necessarily have any taste at all, most people have no idea where to put furniture, what color goes with what, or how to hang art, many people live in large almost empty houses (the address and the exterior the appearance is all about impressing others and not always a true reflection of how they live inside the house) and your biggest market as a home stager won’t be the very wealthy anyway, it will be mostly middle and upper middle class families .
So don’t let the address, or how a house looks from the outside, intimidate and scare you into thinking you won’t know how to handle the staging project!
