Dressed to Sell

With Houses Lingering on the Market, Builders Outfit Their Model Homes

At Broad Creek Landing in Annapolis, Winchester Homes decorated this model home to sell faster. The community of 24 single-family houses has seven that remain unsold. (Photos By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

Sales were swift when Winchester Homes began marketing Broad Creek Landing, a cul-de-sac community of 24 single-family houses not far from downtown Annapolis -- so swift that Winchester officials saw no need to decorate their model home.

But 18 months later, the market has cooled and there are seven houses left to be sold, starting in the upper $700,000s.

In January, Winchester enlisted Model Home Interiors of Elkridge, Md., to decorate three key rooms in its model, which had been sitting empty since it was constructed in July because it was assumed that the project would sell out quickly. In went two oversize brown chairs and a coffee table in the family room; a table, four chairs and a pitcher in the solarium; and another table with four chairs and a bowl of fake pasta in the dining room.

"This is better than it being plain white walls," said Pat Vogt, community sales manager for the project, as she stood in the dining room.

Back during the boom years, when people would camp overnight to buy into a new community, the model home lost some of its impact as a selling tool. Like Winchester, some builders did not even decorate their models. Others used the models only to market their upgrades. Now that the pace of sales has slowed, however, builders and interior designers say the model home has become more important than ever in marketing an entire community.

One sign that model-home merchandising is making a comeback is the growing popularity of "vignette" decorating, or dressing up certain rooms rather than an entire house. When builders are stuck with leftover houses to sell, they try to entice buyers by making the most popular spaces, such as the dining room and family room, seem more livable by adding furniture, tapestries, knickknacks or even fake fruit. In essence, it is a quickie styling job to get a house off the market.

And it can work -- a well-decorated model can have great impact, said Dave Kolakowski, a real estate agent who works with home buyers at Buyer's Edge in Bethesda. "It's always a very emotional thing," he said. "When they walk in and see it done, it's a huge difference. It's what gets them excited."

Jerry Bashore, vice president of Model Home Interiors, said he usually does one or two vignettes in a year. In the past six months, however, he has done one or two a month. At the 19-home Nottingham Acres community in Ellicott City, Md., Model Home Interiors decorated the family room, kitchen and sunroom of the 4,188-square-foot Fieldbrooke model home in late April. At Broad Creek Landing, Bashore's company did a vignette not just in the model home but also in what is known as an inventory house, one that's ready for move-in.

Meanwhile, JoAnn McInnis, vice president of the Great Falls interior design firm Carlyn and Co., said she is getting more calls from builders who want their model homes redecorated. "They were done without necessarily the intent to sell as hard as they needed to," she said.

The theory behind the renewed emphasis on model-home decorating is this: A shopper will be more willing to buy a home if it is decorated than if it is not, even if the buyer has no intention of furnishing the home that way.

What interior designers try to do, McInnis said, is "create house lust."

If you walk into a model home, you may find a child's bedroom with an intricate mural of a cartoon scene, a basement that resembles a sports bar with a pool table and a full-size bar, or perhaps an exercise room with state-of-the-art treadmills and stair-steppers.