Staging a Small Room to Showcase Ample Space
Staging a Small Room to Showcase Ample Space
The Toronto-based home staging team at Design to Impress see small bedrooms as an inviting challenge. To a buyer, a small bedroom could be seen as a negative, especially if it’s packed with clutter. Buyers are always looking for as ample space in any room.
The home stager will remove everything out of a small room, putting back only the essentials, without blocking accessible areas, like wall outlets. Your bed may be placed in front of the bedroom window, likely in the centre of the room, creating walking space around it.
The bed will be layered with sheets, throws and blankets made of fine fabrics, all new and clean. Pillowcases will also be replaced. Everything the bed is decorated with will be colour coordinated with the room’s interior.
Lighting will be placed at the bed’s sides, perhaps a floor lamp on the right, and a table lamp on a nightstand to the right. The stand could also host a few small accessories that suggest intimacy and relaxation, such as a book or alarm clock.
By keeping the room minimal, decorated and tidy, a small bedroom normally frowned upon can be viewed as one of the house’s highlights, using the magic touch of Design to Impress.
Our home stagers know how to make small appear bigger than they are, and large rooms less vapid. To a home stager, a buyer’s perception of a room’s size can always be played with.
A common mistake homeowners make is placing too much furniture in the biggest room of the house, simply because the space is accommodating. By doing so, they’ve managed to turn a spacious room into a crowded one, making it appear no larger than the other rooms in the house.
Furniture isn’t the only thing that distorts a room’s dimensions. The wrong colour on the walls could make one feel claustrophobic. An abundance of sofa pillows may look cluttered. Even something like small window treatments are a mistake – curtains or shutters should be tailored to the size of the window, in order to sell the lighting it brings in.
Some homeowners show off a room’s space by keeping its contents minimal. This is just as bad of an error, because it displays the room as a hollow one, and as such, unappealing to buyers.
Home stagers find the middle ground in rooms large and small. For example, they can take a narrow room and add shelving to it. The liner structure of the shelves adds depth to the room, especially when the back of the shelves are painted the same colour as the walls.
By altering the perception of a room’s size, our home stagers will ensure your home sells for a high return on investment.
There is a belief among homeowners that aligning sofas against walls creates a larger space. This is a popular misconception. If a home stager aligns furniture against a wall, there will always be a small area of space between the sofa and the wall.
One of the ways our home stagers make a room appear larger is by grouping furniture together, floating couches and chairs away from the walls. One approach is to create conversational groups, positioning sofas and chairs towards each other. This allows people to sit down and face one another for an intimate setting.
Another approach to furniture grouping is to face sofas and chairs towards a focal point, perhaps a TV or a fireplace. There may be a buffer zone between seats, enough for a table or a narrow walkway.
Home stagers will ensure traffic flow around the grouped-furniture is vast, showcasing a wide area of space for people to walk, stand and maneuver. As such, furniture grouping variations will always make a room appear larger than they are.
The common denominator between all the houses and condos staged by Design to Impress is colour, specifically, the manipulation of colour used to enlarge or shorten a room’s appearance.
When our home stagers redecorate any room, they’re really catering to the human eye, the perception of how we see things. Your home stager will likely repaint the walls of a small room with a bright colour, because light colours make things look further than they actually are. On the other side the coin, larger rooms may be painted with a darker tone, in order to imply an enclosed space.
Colour tone changes how we see things. Our home staging team takes advantage of this by painting adjoining rooms the same colour, to trick us into seeing one big room. They may even paint the trim and ceilings the same colour as the wall, since the human eye stops where a colour ends. If we can’t immediately see the corners of a room, it feels like we are in a larger room than we really are. This can be quite beneficial for people not comfortable in small spaces.
Alternatively, a long and narrow hallway may turn off potential buyers. The stager may paint the ends of the wall a different shade of colour than the sides, to make the journey from one room to another appear less time-consuming. Additionally, ceilings may be repainted with a darker tone than the walls, to create the illusion of low ceilings.
Our home stagers will also use paint tones when they want to draw attention to focal points of a room, or conceal areas deemed unattractive. For example, they may paint an HVAC system the same colour as your walls, for blending and aesthetic purposes.
The perception of a large room depends on its furniture. If a room is cluttered with accessories and furnishings, the room will feel small. However, simply removing one item can make all the difference. For example, if a large coffee table sits in front of a couch and a couple of seats, replacing the coffee table with an ottoman can suddenly create walking space and room to flow.
A large bookshelf is a perfect example of tweaking a buyer’s perception of a room. Rather than replace the bookshelf with a smaller one, a home stager may simply remove personal contents on it, like family photos and awards, and replace them with a plant or vase. Old books may be replaced with neutral coloured, same-length stacks. Anything large will be removed outright, showing off the bookshelf’s shelving space. Once again, removal of larger items suddenly makes the bookshelf look larger, and as such, the room becomes spacious.
Colour-coordinating accessories, including pillows and throws, plays a large part in reshaping any room. In fact, when it comes to colour, using a darker tone on the living room walls could make it look constrictive. That same colour on your bedroom walls could make it look intimate and inviting.
While this sounds like a simple solution, every room is different. The removal of furniture can sometimes backfire, as removing too much can make a room look sterile. This is where the expertise of the home stager comes into effect.
With critical eyes, Toronto’s home stagers, Design to Impress, can determine what stays and what goes in any room, so that all a potential buyer sees is a home they want to call their own.