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Interior design is highly personal - everyone has a slightly different idea of what a "beautiful" home looks like. However, when listing your home for sale, it’s important to make design choices that are as widely appealing as possible, to ensure that prospective buyers feel comfortable and at home in the space. While a major renovation for the sake of appealing to more buyers is usually not a sensible investments, small tweaks can mean the difference between multiple offers and hoping for the buyer who can see past your personal choices. When trying to connect with a larger audience, it’s best to stick with décor that is clean, modern, minimal, and cohesive. I often rely on mass-market brands like West Elm and CB2, who make a business of appealing to a wide and urban audience, for design ideas and inspiration. Here are my top five strategies for tweaking an apartment from niche to "nice" for the most people.
1. Use Cool Paint Colors: Cool tones (blues, greys, greens) create a space that feels calm and quiet. Lighter shades in these family are also the best at reflecting (thus maximizing) light. Darker shades in these tones make for interesting accent walls or a great wall to make strange nooks look purposeful.
2. Furniture to Scale: Make sure your furniture is scaled to your home. This doesn't necessarily mean physically small items work better, it's all about the amount of visual space items take up relative to the amount of space. A tailored sectional is much larger than any single armchair, but an oversized, cushy armchair will dwarf most small spaces. I find this to be especially true with dining chairs. Even sleek chairs can take up visual space and appear like blocks, but sleek items, particularly those that are wire, caned, or acrylic recede from view. 3. Pinterest Worthy Vignettes Use specific furniture and accent items to highlight the best features of each room – if you have a large corner window, or a particularly beautiful kitchen island, create a vignette that will to draw people’s attention to it. My go-to vignette is a tall item (vase or candlesticks) next to a stack of design books, with an interesting object. 4. Decluttering Make sure there is “white space” in every room – clear surfaces, open space on shelves, etc. A room rarely looks good with every square inch filled. Bookshelves over-flowing with books, piles of paper, collections of random décor items – unnecessary clutter often makes your home appear overwhelming, and thus unappealing, to prospective buyers. 5. Impactful Minimal Décor: Rather than filling every inch of wall space with random art, thing about wall decor as vignettes. Whether it is an oversized painting or a cohesive gallery wall, your art work should create an impact.
These small improvements can make a big difference, but there are more than just simple design and decor items that affect a home's price. To see how we value a home's physical space, read about our top factors here.
Investing in physical improvements of a home can increase its sale price dramatically, but can be costly depending on the service. With the Compass Concierge Program, Compass will pay the upfront cost of select services that can increase a home's value. From deep-cleaning to cosmetic renovations, we'll elevate your home's appeal and create a tailored plan to maximize its potential on the market. When your home sells, the cost (and nothing more) will be added to the commission.
This apartment was cleaned, staged, and painted with funds from Compass Concierge. These services, supplemented with decor and styling by the Isil Yildiz Team, gave this Park Slope brownstone a fresh, modern update to maximize its appeal.