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Best Top 10 Tips for Home Staging with Shelf Decor
These shelves were composed for a design client in Santa Luz. The end result? A cohesive theme and color story featuring curated objects d’art. Staged by The House Whisperers.
Everything you wanted to know and more about home staging with shelf decor!
If you’re staging your home before it goes on the market, you’ve most likely received advice from your real estate agent(s) about de-cluttering as much as possible and packing away anything that’s personal.
Staging is the process of depersonalizing a space and arranging the items in that space to their best advantage. It also allows a prospective buyer to imagine her items in the space. One place to start is your built-in bookcases and shelves around your property. These surfaces are your opportunity to display the lifestyle potential buyers could have in this home.
Composing shelves, in particular can be a challenge because they’re designed as exactly that—a place to keep all that clutter—but it doesn’t have to be, and the last thing you want is for potential buyers to feel overwhelmed as they are walking through the property. So, if you’re prepping a home for sale, here are our simple and easy seller-friendly top ten tips for staging your shelves:
These are some upstairs hall shelves in a decidedly zen-style home The House Whisperers staged in La Measa.
This lovely office, with it’s dark cabinetry and accent wall, was brightened up considerably with white accessories and light upholstered pieces, then books in a Classic Hermes Orange were arranged artfully to carry the eye around the room. Staged by The House Whisperers.
Start with a clean slate. Remove everything from the shelves. Repair any scratches or dings and paint the shelves if necessary. Dust or polish the shelves.
Staging shelves beautifully is an art form in and of itself, but remember, staging is not decorating, so pack away heirlooms. This is the time for your Lladro or Himmel collections to be put away and to make way for more generic items like books, vases and boxes (this is #4). As you begin to stage your shelves remember—less is more! The House Whisperers uses the interior design industry's 30% rule as a guideline when decorating shelves, so we recommend minimalism and filling only about a third of a shelf. Remember, you’re selling the built-in, not the items on display, so leave empty space on the shelves for the eye to rest.
Leave a few strategically spaced shelves empty to help create the feeling of more space. After all, buyers will be paying for square footage and a house will always feel bigger with less stuff. Also, you want them to see that there’s plenty of room for storage, not that the space is maxed out. If your shelves are full, it will leave the subconscious impression that there’s no room for their stuff. So edit accordingly, then everything else gets packed away and will be ready for the movers once your house has sold. Nice!
Whether the items are books or accessories, they can be grouped by theme, color, shape, or material and propped up with bookends. Symmetrical design where items of the same size are opposite each other works best in more formal areas such as living rooms, dining areas, and stately dens. More asymmetrical design is best in the more casual areas like offices and family rooms where you can achieve a balance by placing like-sized or colored items in a Z-pattern to carry the eye pleasingly from one end of a shelf to the other end on the shelf below it and so on.
You can remove shelves or change shelf height to add larger singular items like vases as they will photograph much better than small clusters of items.
Horizontally stacked books make great bookends and perches for objects d'art like silver trophies, orbs, boxes, pottery, and greenery, but try to keep decorative items larger than a cantaloupe or shelves can start to look junky in photos. We also love using lamps, design-forward or sculptural items on shelves. Organic and textured items such as driftwood and geodes are all the rage right now and they make great additions to an artfully arranged shelf. On occasion, we’ll stage bookshelves with a single type of object repeated over and over again for continuity. This could be a collection of vintage cameras or typewriters, or an art glass collection. For kitchens, we clear the existing shelves and use attractive cookbooks, white pottery or clear glass repeated on open shelves and in glass cabinets.
Grouping books by color or intermingling one specific color, like the Hermes Classic Orange shown in the photo, or vertically arranging them by size, helps make arrangements that are most pleasing to the eye. Stacks of coffee table books or open books, like an atlas opened to a beautiful map that happens to color coordinate with the decor, can be just enough to visually complete a lower shelf.
Using smaller framed artwork or generic photos on shelves helps fill space and can be more cost-effective than books alone. Think small framed city scenes, photos of nature, and travel photography. It’s especially nice if the items tell a story that related to the home, like groupings of beachy photos, driftwood, and large shells or starfish perched on naturally-colored books for a coastal property.
For a cleaner, more uniform look, you can spray paint books white, but most fabric book covers will require several coats of paint, so we prefer to wrap them in white paper, brown butcher paper, or gift wrap (check Pinterest for diagrams on how to fold paper to make book covers). We like to remove the dust jackets from hardbacks for a less busy, more uniform look. And, and our very best-kept secret is to turn the covers inside out so that you have crisp, clean white covers and a streamlined look overall.
If you’ve got old books that you’d like to get rid of, call your local library or let your local stager know. Books for home staging companies can seem like an endless expense, so stagers are almost always happy to cart off any old hardback books or booksets you’re not planning to take with you when you move.
These were some shelves we did for a long-time design client when she moved to a new home and went from traditional decor to more of a modern vibe.
Close-up showing some of the more mid-century and organic items mixed with some of her previously owned items.
Close-up of newly style shelving with whites, creams, neutrals that result in a clean, sohpisticated, curated look.
These shelves were staged by The House Whisperers for an interiori design video shoot in San Elijo Hills Estates, San Marcos, California. Accessories sourced at Z Gallerie.
This lovely custom cabinetry was staged with botanic prints, globes, candles and books for a sophisticated farmhouse feel to fit the style and geographic location of the home. Staging by The House Whisperers.
Shelves we did for a design client’s office utilizing white, black, natural and grey.
Close-up of shelves. Lots of texture, white, natural tones and eclectic items that give a collected feel.
Close-up of office shelf decor including marble vases and bowls, pottery, sentimental items, graphic bookends, and coffee table books.
This shower shelf decor was chosen to add a touch of whimsy to an architecturally significant $10M beach house in Mission Beach. Staging by The House Whisperers.
The House Whisperers is a top award-winning staging company that stages prolifically both vacant and occupied homes throughout Southern California. Call us today for a quick home staging estimate over the phone at 858-335-9577. We can also schedule a complimentary quick quote or paid consultation to help you prioritize and make cost-effective cosmetic changes to maximize your sales time and proceeds. In times of quarantine, these services can, of course, be performed via Facetime or Zoom.
For more info, visit www.house-whisperers.com
This coastal shelf decor done by The House Whisperers in a traditional La Jolla home brought to mind for buyers the proximity to the ocean while the blue and white tied into the Spanish tile throughout the home.
This was some muted shelf decor done for a main bedroom requiring a feminine feel.
More muted shelf decor for a bedroom that helps evoke feeling of calm.