Ask a lot of real estate agents and they'll tell you, in essence, "All the house's a stage! Hire a stager--they'll make your property look better than it's ever looked, and that will translate into money into your pocket." Staging can add $30,000 to $60,000 to a sale price. One young San Francisco home seller I interviewed said she spent about $10,000 on the staging, and in the end she got about three times that much through the sale.

When it comes to more expensive properties, the difference can be dramatic. Arthur McLaughlin, the man who founded the staging industry in the Bay Area some 20 years ago, once did a $30,000 staging of a three-story home that went on the market for $2.2 million. When it sold for $300,000 above the asking price, The Wall Street Journal featured it as an example of staging success.

Staging, which can cost everywhere from $2,000 to $80,000, is about showing off the houses' best qualities and obscuring its deficiencies. The art of the stager is to employ even the tiniest details to create a look. Stagers do buyers a great service -- they perform some of the nitty-gritty work that otherwise will not get done.

Stagers will remove clutter and your beloved but unstylish mementos (like that bronze donkey next to the fireplace), fix the cracked plaster, paint your quirky orange kitchen a soft, innocuous yellow and clean like there is no tomorrow. They often recommend new paint, sheer curtains and refinished floors -- all very practical upgrades when trying to sell a house. They eschew grays and cool blues; they brush on the warm whites, soft yellows and sage greens.

"Staging is about selling a fantasy -- of the way people really want to live," says McLaughlin, who leaves a bowl of Hershey's Kisses at the entrance of each of his homes. "In the fantasy, you never have desks in the bedroom, never have an exposed TV, and there are never paperback books. Trash cans are banished."

In the beginning, McLaughlin says, the profession had an air of taboo about it. "It was sort of a secret thing," he explained. "Real estate agents didn't want anybody to know if a house was staged. Even now, I get some clients who ask me to sign a confidentiality clause."

Incidentally, stagers are careful not to deceive buyers. For instance, McLaughlin says he won't paint over stains on a ceiling that suggest a roof leak unless he knows the leak has been fixed. "It's just asking for a lawsuit," he explains. "But I will put a palm in front of a window that looks out on some ugly power lines."

Since his early days staging elite homes in Piedmont and Oakland, McLaughlin has built an empire from a once offbeat idea and with a romantic San Francisco aesthetic. His design firm now employs 24 designers and maintains about 8,000 square feet of warehouse space stuffed with antique furniture, art, throw pillows, linens and just about anything else a San Francisco home could dream of. His firm has the capacity to fully furnish about two dozen large homes at any given time and has worked on everything from low-priced condos to $25 million-dollar mansions in the City. Much of his work involves traveling around the world for what can only be called extreme shopping; he's been known to buy 350 lamp shades at a time.

In the process, McLaughlin has honed staging to an art: It's about projecting a lifestyle free from the mundane mess of our chaotic, high-tech, disposable culture and harking back to an era when there was time to fill one's house with fresh-cut flowers and stare out the window and watch the bluebirds nest.

Excerpts from: Watching the Bluebirds Nest
- Stagers create the illusion of an idyllic leisure lifestyle
by Carol Lloyd
sfgate.com