Click and drag the arrow left and right to see the before and after image

Home staging tip: A few months ago I visited this beautiful mid-century modern home in Seattle to work with the client on a staging consultation. That’s right, in my opinion, staging consultations are never a one-way approach. I consider them a collaboration between the home stager and the home seller. You give recommendations to them, and they give you information that you will use to create a complete staging plan. One of my first questions is always: “Do you have a place to store some furniture in case we decide to remove part of it?”. Usually, the answer is either “Yes, we can use my storage unit” or “Yes, we can use my garage”, which, by the way, is totally fine.

For this house, my goal was to create more visual space since this was the most important room in the house. Not only because it was the very first room the buyers would have seen, but also because it was the most used room in the house (the kitchen was at the right of the table). The first thing I suggested was to use less furniture for the seating area, especially on the window side. I mean, with a yard like that and a window like that, you want to make sure visitors have no distractions or obstacles to bump into, right?

The second thing we did was to create more room around the table as well. And that is probably the easiest thing to do to create visual space in a small dining room: just remove the rug under the table along with the two chairs at the end of it, and you are done. This is even more dramatic if you have hardwood floors, like in this case. As you can see, the living/dining room not only looks much bigger but it also has a better traffic flow.

Home staging consultation by Francesca Tosolini
Listing by Jonathan Jones
Photos by Francesca Tosolini