Mall window shopping doesn't have to be an aimless pursuit. It can be a great tool for fresh, innovative ideas in Home Staging. Do you feel as if you are duplicating the same few designs over and over with your customers? You don't want to see the same look and neither do real estate agents and clients. Learn how window shopping can spark creative ideas for new home staging design.
Copyright (c) 2009 Alice Chan
Do you ever feel like you're doing the same thing over and over again? That's how I feel about our family meals. We know how to make a handful of dishes relatively well and it's just a never-ending rotation of the same things, week after week. Sound familiar - BORING!
This could happen with our Staging design as well. We know what inventory we have to work with and how it could be set up. It can be a challenge sometimes to keep your design plans fresh.
I was very conscious of this because I didn't want realtors to walk into one of my staged properties and say, "Oh, this looks just like what she did at the XYZ house". If we staged a property in town and then another property in a nearby city, I did not have a problem recreating the same look there, but we NEVER used a similar design in the same city where the same group of realtors would likely see the house.
I always reminded my team of the absolute necessity to vary the design on every property we worked on. So what do you do when you run out of ideas? How about window shopping?
I recently walked by Banana Republic and saw two windows and had to take a photo because the first thing that popped in my mind was, that would be a great idea for Staging!
In the left window was a mannequin wearing a partially completed dress design and design sketches in the background of a design work table. This would be a great theme for an office. You can probably find some photos from magazines to substitute the sketches or even find a clothing design sketchbook that you can extract pages from. Framing the tear sheets would give you a more polished look.
The right window showed the mannequin wearing the finished design plus a second mannequin seated "sketching" at the work table. It was easy to trace the progress of the design from the first window to the second window.
Need ideas for kitchens? Visit some gourmet cooking stores.
Need ideas for bathrooms? Visit the bath department of a department store.
I love visiting the china department at Bloomies or Macys to get ideas for tablescapes.
Schedule some extra time for your next visit to the mall to look around and see where you can find additional inspiration for your staging plans.