With summer on the horizon, now is the time for a home refresh! Justine Wilson, a Sydney property stylist and founder of Vault Interiors, says by adding pops of colour you can quickly and easily get your interior and outdoor spaces looking amazing for alfresco dining and entertaining.
Justine’s top 5 tips for a party-ready summer home include:
1. Create an alfresco zone
This will depend on the type of outdoor space available to you. For a small balcony, ensure you have a cute café or pod set so you can enjoy those late summer nights outside. For larger homes, an outdoor lounge or outdoor dining table is a must to have long lunches and dreamy dinners. Bunnings is my pick for affordable yet stylish outdoor furniture.
2. Accessorise!
Add colourful pops with outdoor rugs, outdoor cushions, coloured planter pots or lanterns. There are so many great coloured outdoor items available, and summer is a time for bright happy tones like yellow, pink, teal or green. Try Freedom for great outdoor dressings. Also, don’t overlook outdoor crockery, serving ware and glassware. Having fun coloured plates or glasses can be an easy way to dress up a casual dinner.
3. Light it up!
Consider adding fairy or party lights so you have a pretty and festive twinkle to your outdoor zones. Also, flameless LED candles are a great way to get ambient lighting without the mess or risk of candles melting.
4. Swap out inside
For your interiors, swap out any heavy rugs throws or cushions and introduce soft, light airy materials such as sisal rugs, sheer curtains and cotton blankets or throws. Linen cushions will also add a relaxed summery feel to your sofas.
5. Greenery
Whether inside or outside, nothing says summer holidays like lush greenery; this could be leafy branches or cuttings from a florist in a vase, planter pots or larger outdoor plants for outside. Either way, having real plant life is a wonderful way to bring the outdoors in and create a lush resort-style feel. Palm trees, Ficus and Fiddle Leaf are wonderful selections for your indoor spaces, while outside architectural style plants such as Yuccas are great.
Styling your home: getting the icing on the cake right!
Styling is what Emma Blomfield calls “the fun bit” of interiors! And it’s definitely the case that a few styling tricks can totally lift your space. We’re big on homes…
Styling a home for sale is a lot different to how you style it for yourself. The following tips and photos are taken from the new coffee table book, Property Stylists of Australia 2020, produced by the International Institute of Home Staging (IIHS).
Image: Styleness
Don’t style to the latest trends Trends come and go and so it is important to style with items that are as timeless as possible. Select furniture that is neutral and classic with simple lines and then mix it with décor that is on trend, without polarising buying groups.
Ensure the house has a ‘soul’ It’s not only vacant properties that are presented with no furniture and accessories that have a lack of ‘soul’. Sometimes, the way we live means that we think our home is perfectly fine but it lacks ‘soul’, particularly in the eyes of buyers. By a ‘soul’, I mean that feeling you get when you walk into a home and get that comforting, warm all over feeling – the feeling that you would really like to live right here.
Buyers are not just looking for ‘pretty’ when they inspect a property. To ensure a buyer develops an emotional connection, three of the major senses need to be involved. Lovely, but appropriate furniture and accessories are just part of the experience. Creating the right environment with scent, touch and sight are all important to us. Try lighting a scented candle to begin the staging and styling.
Image: Staging Designs
Maximise the space Less is more when styling to sell. Too much furniture or large oversized furniture can reduce the size of a room and too many accessories can make a space feel cluttered. Appropriately sized furniture needs to be placed so the traffic can flow within the property. Buyers need to feel that there is plenty of room and the traffic flows smoothly. Similarly, it’s great to have beautiful items such as books, vases, flowers, plants and cushions for the buyer to connect to but keep it simple and stylish with beautiful textures, so as not to overcrowd the area.
Stay true to the architectural design and location When staging a property for sale, it is so important to style it in a way that is sympathetic to the original design of the property. A heritage house in the Hunter Valley will be styled differently to a modern new build beachfront property. The property is different along with the target market, and it needs to be styled accordingly.
This does not mean of course that we only use antique or dark furniture in heritage houses, it simply means we pay a ‘nod’ to the period by using a more classic style that will still appeal to a more modern buyer.
Pay attention to symmetry, proportion and balance It is quite difficult to cultivate that homely feeling when proportions of furniture and symmetry are out of whack, or if there are too many furniture pieces in the one small room. Symmetry and proportion are important rules to follow so the space doesn’t feel cluttered – or for larger areas, to avoid the space feeling completely empty!
Image: Tweak Home Staging
Style using layers, textures and organic elements Start with a base and build the layers from there. Layers can be created with flooring, furniture and drapery or a rug, sofa and cushions or coffee table, tray and greenery. Layers are just as important in the lighting options used in a room. They consist of task lighting, ambient lighting and general lighting. These layers help easily explain the function and set up the desired ambience of the room.
Including textures within the layers provides a visual diversity, giving the eye many exciting places to settle. Textures help create the exact feeling you are wanting in each space and are perfect when styling for particular seasons. Light cotton and linens with smooth silks for the summer and chunky knits and plush cosy velvets for the winter.
The final touch is to add elements, and the first one is always greenery. Plants play an essential part of styling. They bring life, colour and texture to the room. By combining organic elements such as wood or shells and adding a metal element, you achieve layers and a diversity of textures in the styling.
Image: Right at Home Staging
Colour Integrate the colours of a space as central source of inspiration for the colour palette applied throughout the room or the story/personality that you are trying to create. A related colour palette partnered with techniques such as layering, or complementing accessories that use textures, shape, colour and visual interest, create a flow-on effect from room to room, and keep all spaces working cohesively together.
Good return on investment The word ‘investment’ is a very accurate descriptor of how staging and styling to sell should be assessed. That is exactly what it is, not a cost or a price – it is an investment in realising the highest sale price that would be paid by a potential buyer for the property. Spend those staging dollars in the areas that are the primary focus of the potential buyer pool. There are however absolute ‘must do’ areas, in my opinion. These include the master bedroom, living areas, any room or area directly off the front entry (including the entry and home office), dining spaces, patios and decks (especially in the nicer weather months).
Make an emotional connection This final golden rule is one that can truly make the difference between buyers wanting to buy your home or looking elsewhere. Everyone leads busy lives and more and more buyers want a home to feel like a sanctuary, so the little details matter and are key to making that connection with a buyer.
Think of it like decorations on a cake. The cake may taste delicious but without any decorations the cake will look bare and not as enticing. The decorations for your home are all the little things, like the decorative cushions on the bed that provide a luxurious, relaxed feeling, reminding people of hotels and holidays. It is the touch of greenery and plants through the home that help to add life into a space. It is the textures and patterns in the soft furnishings and decorative accessories that can provide that homely feel.
It’s the combination of these small details that creates a cohesive and inviting space that showcase the aspirational aspects of the property and the lifestyle buyers can emotionally connect with. Remember, first impressions are everything, so make their first impression a lasting one!
IIHS is Australia’s premier home staging and property styling education and membership provider.
If you could do only one thing to make your place more appealing to buyers it would be to hire a property stylist. Property stylists, sometimes called home stagers, are professionals who, through clever use of furniture and accessories like artwork and lighting, make your place more attractive to buyers through aesthetics and ambience.
Image courtesy of Bowerbird Interiors
Here are five things to consider when hiring one, based on what we do:
1. Experience and expertise
Look for stylists who have an interior design background and a track record of consistent delivery. They should also have at least a few years of experience working in real estate. A lot of stylists come from an editorial background, working on photoshoots for magazines and are not always the best choice to help you sell your place.
Experienced stylists should examine your property and also ask about the type of buyers you’re expecting as this will give them a starting point for the kind of transformation they will make.
2. Match the stylist to the property
All professional stylists will have a portfolio. Take some time to look at the stylist’s previous work to see whether their design and style would suit your property. A high-end property, for example, will need someone who can do luxury looks.
While the aim of hiring a property stylist is to neutralise a space so that buyers can visualise its potential, be careful of stylists who use too much white and make the property look bland. Your place should invite buyers to project their own vision on it but also show a little personality of its own.
Image courtesy of Bowerbird Interiors
3. Compare quotes
We usually ask at least two stylists to quote for a job, which makes them more competitive.
For the inner-city Sydney market, prices sit around:
1-bedroom apartment: $2,500
2-bedroom apartment: $3,500
3-bedroom apartment: $4,500-5,000
However, the cost will vary depending on the condition and size of your property and also the availability of property stylists in your area.
Consider this cost as an investment. If the styling attracts even one more buyer than the property would have had if left unstyled, then the price tag is worth it. At auction, one more prospective buyer will easily pay back the stylist’s fee.
4. Prepare your property
The most helpful renos you can do to support a property stylist’s work is to paint the walls a neutral colour and replace any worn carpet. While the stylist will bring in their own furniture to help freshen up the place, nice furniture can’t hide walls that are too distinctive (or unattractive) or ugly floors.
Your property also needs to be empty before the stylist can transform it.
Image courtesy of Bowerbird Interiors
5. Leave enough time
Stylists need at least a week’s lead time to source the right furniture and accessories, and installation will generally take between a few hours to a day, depending on the size of your property. The more time you can give the stylist the better; very busy stylists will work on several properties at once and a longer lead time may mean you can secure better furniture and accessories for your property.
Real estate is all about a feeling and styling is the ideal way to create that emotional connection between a property and a prospective buyer. It is well worth the time, money and effort to have your place styled, so take this advice into consideration when you’re next looking to sell.
