When viewing a property to rent or buy, how much do you really think about where the couch is placed in the living room, or how the kitchen table aligns with the counters and windows? Ideally, you’ll think about it very little, and with a lot of hard, meticulous work (and a dash of magic), you will feel those details of form and function. If the space has been arranged with skill and taste by an experienced hand, the effect on a potential buyer or renter will be subtly, and powerfully, affirmative.
In a nutshell, this is the work of Missoula Staging, a small cooperative of local real estate agents and designers who each bring a unique flavor and skillset—and decades of collective expertise—to the task of home staging.
Becky Broeder, Missoula Staging’s resident design expert, provides this working definition of home staging: “furnishing a home to better market it,” she says, “to show how a home can be lived in, to showcase the potential of the property.”
“It’s not only furnishing it,” adds Shannon Hilliard, longtime Missoula realtor and Missoula Staging co-op member, “but it’s arranging things in a way that helps define spaces, helps people see how it lives and helps people have an emotional connection to a house, because emotions make us want to buy. You need an emotional connection.”
In the staging business, getting to that effective emotional resonance in a potential client recalls an old adage that most of us have heard in some form or another, which applies also to the best of any other art form: show, don’t tell.
“It’s impossible to describe to someone how to furnish a room,” Becky says. “You have to show them.”
“I’ve been an interior designer for 20 years,” she continues. “My whole goal is to make people feel comfortable and safe, and that things work for them and reflect who they are and how they live. It’s trying to get at human emotion and not a specific personality.” This can be achieved by adhering to the fundamental elements of design: “filling the space appropriately, scale, color, texture, softness, all those components that you put together in a package, where people don’t even realize what they’re seeing or feeling. It’s just coming together harmoniously and they get it on an unconscious level.”
“From a pure sales perspective,” Shannon says, “usually when people are moving, they’re going through something. It’s positive or negative, but oftentimes there’s a life change: they got married, they got divorced, they had kids, the kids moved out, the parents are moving in with them. Something big is happening, it’s overwhelming, so if you can come into a space and [big exhale] decompress for a minute, it makes saying ‘yes’ a lot easier.”
In addition to arranging accouterments in a home’s floor plan to inspire or inform potential buyers, Missoula Staging can also provide the kind of guidance for homeowners akin to the guidance a producer offers to a musician, or an editor to a writer.
“One of the things we can do as stagers is advise people what to do with what they already have in their house,” Shannon says. “Oftentimes we say ‘take down the old, dark curtains, go with a top-down, bottom-up blind so you can let some light in the top but have that privacy on the bottom.’ A lot of that is consultation. You can hire us for hourly work, also.”
Whether they’re showcasing the potential of a new home or the possibilities of what currently exists in your place, Becky and Shannon want to note that desired results often do not come as easily as one might imagine, but with a lot of trial and error.
“There’s a lot of tweaking,” Becky says. “Endless amounts of fluffing and tweaking.”
“But fun!” adds Shannon. “It’s super fun to do.”