Faced With a Lack of Style, Invent It

By Stephanie Cavanaugh
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, January 14, 2006

Alice Wilson paced the empty Capitol Hill living room. The manager of Antique and Contemporary Leasing, a company that provides furnishings and design advice for houses going on the market, pursed her lips and said, "Usually you want the bones of the room to show, but . . . "

What remained unsaid: There were no bones. It was a blank box without a single distinguishing feature.

"You have to have a focal point," she said, waving in the delivery men, backs bent under a mammoth black lacquered secretary, a Chinese antique of about the same size and scale as a fireplace.

"Living rooms are built around a fireplace," Wilson said. "If it doesn't have one, you need a focal point to make it more interesting."

With the secretary in place, the room quickly took shape. A white damask sofa, a few heavily carved chairs, a jewel-colored oriental carpet, a gilt mirror for glitz, a couple of wall-sized Chinese ancestral portraits and suddenly there's a British-occupation-of-Hong Kong motif. That utterly boring, characterless room positively screams for a chic load of guests clinking ice cubes.

Is it cheating for home sellers to imply detail where none exists? What happens when the secretary is toted out, along with the ancestors and the scalloped tea tray coffee table? When the new owners realize that they bought a bare box?

"It's not cheating. It's creativity," said Washington decorator Whitney Stewart. "There's no such thing as cheating. If something is transformed, one has creatively envisioned a new idea to enhance a space."

That's one way to put it. Yes, real estate agents generally recommend that sellers try to make their homes scrupulously clean and personality-free. But when you're trying to get top dollar for a house with, shall we say, flaws, sometimes strong measures are needed to lure the buyer.

"Most people don't have imagination. People have to see it," said Daniel Lusk, an agent with Tutt, Taylor & Rankin Real Estate. "Vacant rooms are the worst. They look smaller than they really are. It's hard for people to imagine what they'd use it for. You have to show them what it could be."

Like third bedrooms? "You go into a seller's house and they're using it for storage or the treadmill. That doesn't say to the buyer: This could be a usable, functional bedroom. Put a full-size bed in there. Even one of those inflatable beds with nice sheets and a duvet," Lusk said.

Real estate agents call it "staging," the craft of decorating a home to sell it. Staging generally involves removing clutter -- sending your cherished collection of magnets to storage, for instance. It can also include judicious additions: furniture, accessories and most frequently, paint.

Lusk frequently tweaks rooms to make the most of their sometimes imperceptible charms, rearranging existing furniture or suggesting the owner rent or borrow more elegant pieces. "It warms people up when they see a nice space," he said. "Especially if there's no color on the walls. I do recommend color, neutral colors."

Stewart agreed. "Color is the single most exciting change one can make. Color is for free, almost. It doesn't cost much to get a can of paint.

She said, "These days the popular thing to do to enrich a room is a three -- if not four -- color scheme: one color on the walls, one on the trim . . . and one on the ceiling."

A trick that "heightens a room, makes it grander -- not squished," is to draw a line on a wall where a chair rail would be, then paint one color above the line and one below. "Say a wonderful orange on top and sage green on the bottom. Fresco painters have been doing this for centuries," Stewart said, with a flourish of historical justification.

Another way to add oomph with minimal investment: "Say you have a blue room. Take a light yellow and paint a six-inch-wide border around the window and the door. It enhances whatever pitiful architectural detail there is."

She said, "You have to have a little bit of boldness in your heart. Take a banister rail, often painted black. Do something special. Make it different from everyone else's. Paint it black and white stripes. It will be done tastefully, but get their attention."

Chris Torres is nothing if not bold. The designerand owner of Reincarnations Furnishings, a madly creative home-furnishings shop on 14th Street NW, sniffed, "Everyone wants small in D.C. They live in 500-square-foot apartments and have a million tiny things."

He approaches rooms differently: "Do fewer things and buy medium to large pieces. People will say, 'Wow, large sofa!' Same with color and drama and scale. I'll do a red wall or a brown wall and, 'Wow. Look at the drama of this wall!' You don't need to do castle furniture, but do big stuff, light it well and use dramatic color. The impression is big."

Drawing attention to something smashing goes a long way toward diverting attention from things that are less so. That's a specialty of Deb Gorham's. The real estate agent, who's the president of the regional chapter of the International Association of Home Staging Professionals, recently turned a neat trick on a house in Herndon that had a miserable view.

The small hillside backyard dipped toward a major intersection. From the kitchen window the eye leapt over the five-foot fence surrounding the property. "You could read the license numbers of the cars as they headed toward Georgia," Gorham said.

Twelve six-foot Leyland cypress trees were purchased and planted around the patio, snugged at the rear of the house. "We wanted to suggest lots of green instead of lots of street, so we turned it into a little Tuscan setting," she said. "What caught your eye first was the cypress."

The basement of a 1940s house in an up-and-coming Arlington neighborhood was a different story. "How can I put this nicely? It was a pit," Gorham said. "So we turned it into what I then called the Pantheon Theater."

Deep red silk moiré was hung over insulated wall board covered with fluffy batting. "Just luscious. It looked like a bordello," she said. The ceiling was painted black, low pile carpeting was installed and black velvet drapes held back with tassels framed the second-hand screen that the owners bought at a camera shop along with a used projector. Two days and $1,295 later, the pit was an over-the-top home theater.

Have an unfinished basement -- really unfinished? Take inspiration from Reincarnations' basement showroom, where rough brick meets cinderblock, and pipes and wires and coils of this and that drop down below sooty exposed rafters. Not that you'd notice.

Bring in enough fabulous furniture, accessories in punch-drunk colors and great lighting and you have the makings of a subterranean "loft."

"It's always a mistake to try to hide something. The best thing to do is to distract from it," Torres said.

Example? The electrical closet is down there. It's about five feet square, "with the fire sprinkler system, the . . . security system, the phone wires and a big ugly box hanging there. I took the doors off the closet, and put in a table and chairs and a cool chandelier. They don't even notice the boxes," he said.

"The thermostat's in the wrong place? Work it into a collage of stuff. I don't hide it. Put it right out there. Weirdly placed window? Ignore it. I love weird rooms."

Torres said that we had walked right past the electrical meter, centered on one (artfully) crumbling cement wall, "big and clunky with pipes coming out of it," he said.

No one notices.

"It's hanging there above a sofa, flanked by a pair of great contemporary lamps. It comes across as art," he said.

"Don't fight it, take the eye away from it. It's like makeup. The more you try to cover a blemish the more it shows. Go over the top and they'll never see it."