STAGE RIGHT?

MARKET READY
By TIM McKEOUGH
New York Times September 28, 2011

Q. Our old apartment is sitting empty, and not selling. Is it worth the money to hire someone to stage it?

A. Staging an apartment — adding furniture and accessories to make it look lived in — can be expensive. But you may be able to cover your costs, and then some, by creating a more appealing environment.

“I won’t let people come on the market empty if I can help it,” said Deanna Kory, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group, who has used staging to help sell apartments for more than a decade.

Ms. Kory, who has staged apartments on her own and worked with professional staging companies, said renting a hand-picked selection of furniture and arranging it with accessories will often speed up a sale and generate a higher selling price. Generally, she has found that sellers with empty apartments can increase their selling price by “at least 5 to 10 times the investment you’re going to make” in staging, she said.

For instance, if you put in $10,000, it should yield between $50,000 and $100,000 more in profit than an apartment sold empty, she said.

But, she added, “There are good stagers and not-so-great stagers.”

“You have to get recommendations,” Ms. Kory said. “If they have a good track record, they should be able to tell you stories and show you some photos.”

One stager she has worked with is Sid Pinkerton, who runs a company called From Drab to Fab. Mr. Pinkerton has been in business since 2003, and he estimates that he has staged over a thousand apartments in New York City during that time.

One of the primary reasons for staging, he said, is that potential buyers often have difficulty understanding the proportions of empty rooms.

“Most Americans are what I call ‘visually challenged,’ ” Mr. Pinkerton said. “When rooms have no furniture in them, you have no size spec. It raises the question, ‘Will my furniture fit in here?’ The whole point of staging is to answer those questions before they even arise.”

This is especially true, he noted, when it comes to bedrooms. “They might feel small when they’re empty, when in fact they will very easily hold a queen-size bed, nightstand and dresser.”

While every job is different, Mr. Pinkerton said his services for staging an empty apartment “can be as little as $5,000, but up to $15,000 and more,” depending on factors like size and layout. Those figures include furniture rental; if you add some of your own furniture to the mix, the fee would be lower.

The other option, if you’re confident in your design skills, is to do it yourself. Companies like CORT (888-360-2678 or cort.com) and Churchill Furniture Rental (800-941-7458 or furniturerent.com) carry a range of pieces catering to different tastes, available for short-term rental.

Just remember the goal. “You’re trying to appeal to the baseline needs of the general public,” Mr. Pinkerton said, not create a space that reflects your personal style. “Staging is the complete counterbalance to interior design.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/garden/staging-an-apartment-market-ready.html?ref=marketready

Images featured is the work of Bloom Property Stylists in Calgary, Alberta

IS IT EASY BEING GREEN?

MARKET READY
By TIM McKEOUGH
New York Times November 16, 2011

Q. Can green updates increase the value of my home? If so, what are the most cost-effective options?

A. “If you do just one thing, it’s probably not going to add value,” said Jeffrey Schleider, managing director of Miron Properties, a real estate company specializing in green properties, in New York.

But when a number of environmentally friendly updates are implemented all together, they can help your home stand out from the crowd. “If you do five or six things as a package,” he said, “it really makes your property more appealing.”

That said, he added, “there are some investments where you won’t see a return on your investment, because they’re too expensive relative to the value they add.” So he advises starting with easy low-cost changes that target energy savings, clean water and clean air.

To cut energy consumption, he recommends motion-sensor switches in bathrooms and closets that will automatically turn lights on and off when people come and go. Basic models often cost under $20 at hardware stores.

To improve water quality, he suggests installing an under-counter filtration unit by a company like GE or Kohler, for filtered water at the kitchen sink.

“That’s something that people, both environmentally conscious and not, are interested in,” he said. “It stops the use of bottled water, but it’s also a convenience to have clean water at your tap. Even a very good system can be added for a few hundred dollars, and that adds value.”

To improve air quality, he said, sellers should use paints with low or no volatile organic compounds. “It’s not significantly more expensive,” he said, “but can be a huge appeal to buyers. Certain buyers are especially sensitive and can’t even look at homes that don’t have no-V.O.C. paint.”

Ellen Hanson, a New York interior designer who focuses on sustainability, echoed Mr. Schleider’s advice about using low- or no-V.O.C. paint.

She also suggests adding Energy Star-certified kitchen appliances, low-flow bathroom faucets and showerheads, and dual-flush toilets to the list of possible upgrades.

All these items save energy and water, she said, while giving your home a fresh new look.

“We also like to use multilayered window treatments to control solar gain and heat loss,” Ms. Hanson said. “You end up consuming less energy, but whether a buyer of your home would perceive that or not, I’m not sure.”

Indeed, many of these upgrades may go unnoticed if not spelled out in promotional materials. “A lot of them are choices you don’t see,” Ms. Hanson said. “But you can brag about them when you describe your property.”

Mr. Schleider also stresses the importance of marketing these upgrades, pointing out that they could give sellers an edge on the competition.

“It’s pretty tough to sell in some markets right now,” he said. “So any edge you can have is a positive.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/garden/can-green-updates-help-a-homes-resale-value-market-ready.html?ref=garden#

Photo By: Hat Sharpener

TRUE NORTH

In Mats Gustafson’s Stockholm living room, antique and modern mingle freely. Photographs by Magnus Marding. Styled by Jacob Hertzell.

True North
Mats Gustafson
By PILAR VILADAS
November 4, 2011

When you walk into the artist and illustrator Mats Gustafson’s apartment in Stockholm, you’re not quite sure what era you’re in. In the foyer, a turn-of-the-century painting of a bourgeois Swedish interior hangs beneath one of Isamu Noguchi’s oversize paper lanterns, and underfoot is a colorful mid-20th-century rug by Barbro Nilsson for the renowned Swedish workshop MMF. Under a midcentury nude painted by Birger Ljungquist, Gustafson’s great-uncle, sits a simple 1950s stool by the Swedish designer Carl Malmsten. Walk through an angled doorway into the living room, a high-ceilinged space with the graceful proportions and architectural ornament typical of late-19th-century buildings, and the mix gets even richer. An upholstered 19th-century Swedish bench along the window and a group of slipper chairs, all from Gustafson’s family, blend easily with sheepskin-covered wood chairs designed in the 1930s by Bruno Mathsson and tables by Josef Frank. Vases by Scandinavian Modern ceramics masters like Axel Salto and Berndt Friberg are clustered atop a traditional tiled fireplace, and the immaculate plaster walls (which are painted, aptly enough, Stockholm White) are hung with Gustafson’s spare, elegant watercolors. Venture into the apartment’s long corridor, however, and you’ll find up-to-the-minute bathrooms and a sunny, south-facing kitchen in which crisp, utilitarian cabinets provide a clean backdrop for an antique wooden table and chairs. This is an interior that’s modern and old-fashioned at the same time, and in all the right ways.

Gustafson, a Swede who moved to New York in 1980 (and who now lives in a 19th-century farmhouse in Sag Harbor), had kept a small apartment in this building — an imposing structure in Stockholm’s Sodermalm neighborhood — since the 1970s, but when a two-bedroom apartment became available, he couldn’t resist. “I needed a more mature place,” he said, one that would give him a space to work, and which would also provide comfortable living quarters for him and his partner, the jewelry and product designer Ted Muehling. Gustafson treasured the Old World graciousness of the space and wanted to make it more functional while protecting its considerable charms, “not to make it into something it wasn’t,” he explained.

His allies in this effort, as they were in the renovation of the smaller apartment and the Sag Harbor house, were the husband-and-wife architects Neil Logan and Solveig Fernlund of the New York firm Fernlund + Logan. Gustafson and Fernlund, a fellow Swede, have been friends for years. They come from similar backgrounds — they both grew up in the countryside; his mother designed rugs and hers was an art historian — and Gustafson’s 1989 watercolor portrait of Fernlund hangs in the new apartment’s living room. The architects are known for their aesthetically obsessed clients, including artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and the textile manufacturer Michael Maharam, as well as Muehling, whose new Manhattan shop they recently completed.

The Stockholm apartment had been occupied for decades by Hilding Linnqvist, a painter who died in 1984, and his wife, and the rooms were in need of renovation. The kitchen was small, with a separate entrance, and there was a maid’s room, as well as lots of storage that had been added awkwardly throughout the apartment. Fernlund and Logan reorganized this part of the space, enlarging the kitchen and adding a doorway at each end to connect it visually and functionally to the rest of the apartment, getting rid of the maid’s room and adding a laundry room and a modern bathroom (one of two). As Fernlund explained, “The goal for everything we did was to add things we need to live now, without making them feel cut off from the apartment.” Wiring was replaced, woodwork was stripped (and repainted with an oil-based paint to bring out its details), and what had been the service hallway was cleared of its cabinets to make a central corridor that connects the apartment’s studio, living room and master bedroom (which are enfilade, with generous doorways between) with the kitchen, bathrooms and guest room. It was important to the architects that the subtlety of natural light be felt in every room. “Without shadows,” Fernlund said, the light becomes flat and lifeless, “adding that there is no built-in or recessed lighting in the rooms because Gustafson and Muehling prefer the glow of lamps and candles.

Once the spaces were completed, it was time to decorate, and Gustafson had plenty to work with. In addition to his own collections of Scandinavian Modern furniture and decorative arts (which he bought at thrift shops and junk stores before they were rediscovered), he had antiques and paintings from his parents’ house and saw no obstacle to mixing periods. “Rather than get ‘new’ old things,” he said, “I’d reuse these. There’s more of a connection.” Both he and Muehling believe that decorating is layering: “It’s not about perfection. This is very much our territory,” he added. And Muehling brought a touch of humor to the serene rooms with the addition of pieces like a Royal Copenhagen blue-and-white vase painted with ships, which he describes as “kitsch, or bordering on it. It’s different from the extreme good taste that we both tend to do.”

The apartment’s palette consists mainly of grays, browns and ochers against the cool white walls, and though it’s tonally restrained, it’s texturally complex. Gustafson said that his idea of the apartment was less “Fanny and Alexander” and more Vilhelm Hammershoi, the Danish painter known for his monochromatic, nearly empty, ethereally lighted interiors. “The Swedish sense, even if 19th century,” he suggested, “is more homespun — a little drab, if you want — but it is a Nordic thing. It’s not silk and velvet, let’s put it that way.”

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/true-north/