Sometimes a house stager's work is so bewitchingly good, homeowners decide not to sell at all

Whether they know it or not, anyone who's been in the market for a Bay Area home over the last several years has certainly encountered the confident handiwork of stagers. (Unless you believe that most home-sellers are immaculate housekeepers, have brilliant taste and green thumbs, read only from leather-bound books, never look at television or display photos of family or leave jewelry and pocket flotsam atop dressers, and would never, ever place a threadbare Barcalounger in the middle of the living room.) Going into a well-staged home can he like entering a Zen shrine. The decor exudes purity, a cleanliness and an aura of calm that simultaneously frees the spirit and fills the prospective homeowner with impulse buying tendencies typically associated with grocery store checkout lines. The price for this magic? $2,500 and up. For a large home with large rooms, $25,000-$30,00 is hardly out of the question. Starting at $3-$4 a square foot gets one in the right ballpark.

Once upon a time, people selling their houses considered modest home repairs, painting and general tidying up to be all that was needed or expected. In the recent frenzied real estate market hundreds of homes went on the market and sold for over the asking price, with the sellers utterly indifferent to stained shag carpets and piles undone laundry cluttering the hallways. But a well-staged house could make even more of a difference. How much? In some cases millions.

Arthur McLaughlin is one of the Bay Area's best-known and most prolific stagers. Though he just turned 40, McLaughlin has been in the business nearly 20 years and estimates that he's staged more than a thousand homes. His office, from which he's dressed some of San Francisco's most magnificent mansions, sits incongruously across the street from the Westside Court housing project in the Western Addition. Out back McLaughlin maintains a mini-nursery of white orchids, kentia palms, brightly colored bromneliad, and terra-cotta pots in all sizes, all ready to transform his next commission into an urban botanical garden. Beneath his office is one of his three warehouses. Even with most of his inventory deployed at nearly two dozen homes, the room is filled to the rafters with torchiers, lampshades, rolled carpets, replacement lightbulbs and pillows, pillows and pillows. "You can take the most boring sofa, put pillows on it and completely change the feeling of it," McLaughlin says. He ought to know. He owns at least 15 white sofas and frequently has to rent others.

During the height of the real estate boom the point of staging was to ignite a bidding war, to create an impassioned frenzy among buyers. Normally, a staging would be put in place for two months. Last year, Bay Area stagers had to plan like military tacticians, with some large installations going up and coming down all within seven days as buyers made cash offers for an immediate close.

Now, with the market cooling, staging helps sellers realize asking prices that still lean toward the optimistically high side. Although staging often includes landscaping improvements, painting and removal of old carpets and draperies, it does nothing to improve the intrinsic value of a house. However, for buyers used to seeing staged homes, trying to imagine how an empty house might look represents a hurdle too high to overcome. Emotionally, these buyers are out the door before they even cross the threshold.

Depending on whether one views their work from the sellers' or buyers' side, what stagers do is either pure magic or smoke and mirrors. The beautiful green wall of potted plants that makes a garden out of an otherwise uninteresting backyard? Maybe it's hiding some unseemly pipes or a bedraggled fence. The perfectly placed torchiers and brass tent lamps? They serve to light up a room that might otherwise be as dark as a basement.

In many San Francisco homes, the challenge is to make small rooms look large. In older, larger homes, it's to make big rooms with too few windows appear bright and open. That's the reason many stagers remove doors and all window coverings while adding lots of well-placed wattage. Want to see how a house might appear under more typical circumstances? Imagine it with all the doors back in place and closed. Then turn off the lights, suggests one experienced stager.

Not every home seller is thrilled to learn that their lifetime of accumulations don't show the house at its greatest potential. On these occasions, the real estate agent may use a stager not only to do the staging but to serve as something akin to an interior design hatchet man, telling the owners what pieces they can and cannot keep in the house once it goes on the market. In such cases, diplomacy reigns.

McLaughlin recently did a staging for the heirs of a woman who had lived in a large San Francisco home for many, many years. Telling the children that their mother's prized possessions were decades out of date was not what they were likely to want to hear. So the cherished ceramic cheetah that once sat immediately outside the dining room found a new home among the dense foliage at the far end of the yard, where it appeared like something out of ajean-Jacques Rousseau painting. But there are limits as to what even the most accomplished stagers can do with other people's stuff. The large tiki mask that had been mounted just inside the front door? "That had to go," McLaughlin says.

Every now and then sellers decide that they don't want to move at all. With their old shabby, time-worn furniture and clutter out of the way, they fall in love with the home they never realized existed hidden behind all their stuff and take it off the market. In some cases the agent, who most likely recommended the stager in the first place, walks away with nothing. Arthur McLaughlin once staged a home that was to go on the market for $4 million. The owners liked their "new" home so much they decided not to sell, representing a loss to the agent of over $75,000 in commission. "It was a dark day," McLaughlin remembers.

Realtors, sellers and agents all agree that staged homes sell more quickly, with more offers, for more money than ones that haven't been staged or that were done halfway. Many have sold for hundreds of thousands and even millions over the asking prices over the last few years, representing a return of 10 to 50 percent on the cost of the staging itself. Thinking about the notion that stagers ought to get a percentage of the windfall they make possible, Arthur McLaughlin can only smile. "Wouldn't that be great," he says.