Using the art of stagecraft to beguile home buyers

"We live in a house one way, we sell it another," said Malin Giddings, a broker at TRI/Coldwell Banker, who often summons Mr. McLaughlin to stage million-dollar listings with props plucked from an inventory of some 20,000 items: linens, towels, plates, wingback chairs and lampshades. (Mr. McLaughlin buys 350 lampshades at a time.) "He does in four days what a housewife does in nine months," Ms. Giddings said. "I mean, it's a miracle."

Objects that do not fit in are out. Mr. McLaughlin once asked a client with an original Georgia O'Keeffe to put it under the bed. "It didn't fit in with the overall decor," he explained. (He prefers to have his own artist, Janet Bogardus, copy any painting, Monet to O'Keeffe, and alter it to his own specifications - it might need a smidgen more peach, say.)

Such staging tricks can also warm up a newly minted house, said B. J. Droubi, a San Francisco real estate agent, who estimates that staging adds $30,000 to $60,000, often more, to the final price of a home.

"Staging was supposed to be about creating a facade," said D. J. Grubb Jr., president of the Grubb Company, an Oakland real estate agency, who dates the craze to the period just after 1991, when developers were trying to lure buyers to houses they had built to replace thousands destroyed by wildfire in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills. Now, Mr. Grubb said, "it has become an icon, the branding of a house."

Although still largely a West Coast phenomenon - the 1920's hacienda outside Los Angeles owned by William Boyd, aka Hopalong Cassidy, was staged recently - the trend has caught on in cities like Minneapolis, as a strong economy and expectations among time-pinched buyers seeking perfection grow.

Staging takes diplomacy. "You really have to be polite," Mr. McLaughlin said. "People's sofas are very emotional to them."

Staging requires a different knack from regular decorating. Gray, for instance, is not a good resale color, "because it doesn't make a space look happy," Mr. McLaughlin said. Turquoise is a turnoff, reminding peo-ple of "the 'Miami Vice' era." Mr. McLaughlin, who has been staging for 18 years, possibly a national record, recalled a client in the Pacific Heights neighborhood with baby-blue halls and stair runners. "Baby blue is not a resale color, especially in a multimillion-dollar mansion," he said.

Staging is a little bit like romance, Mr. McLaughlin said: "You never get a second chance. First impressions - that's it!"

Ralph Holman, a lawyer for the National Association of Realtors in Chicago, said sellers must disclose "material defects in a property of which they are aware," like a crack in a foundation. But strategically placing a Venetian glass vase at a window to block an unappealing view or making a bedroom look bigger by installing a narrow antique bed are not against the law. "Most buyers are unaware of staging," Ms. Droubi said. "But there's a fine line. You don't want people to feel manipulated."

Peter Sargent, a science professor at the University of California at San Francisco, recently bought an 1883 house in the Noe Valley area that had been staged. But what appealed to Professor Sargent was not the things that had been staged. It was the old stove and the view of a steeple between poplar trees. Staging, he said, "reveals the pathology of the real estate industry and how calculated it has become."

 Arthur McLaughlin - This stager used furniture from his three warehouses and orchid garden to turn a funky cabin into a romantic residence. The seller, a San Franciscan, paid $9,000 for McLaughlin's services.

Excerpts from the New York Times.