What’s the difference between interior design and home staging?

Just like being a chef and studying culinary arts, home staging and interior design functions the same. Every time we hear about home staging, we often relate it to interior design. This is what sellers prefer to always go hand in hand before listing their property.

Interior design is an art of designing a house or a room or even a whole building. The International Interior Design Association (IIDA) has defined a Professional Interior Designer as a person who is “qualified by education, experience, and examination to enhance the function and quality of interior spaces.” [1] This profession requires a deeper understanding of art and its elements. They must know how to play with spaces, colors, lines, prints, patterns, etc., and must be updated with the current trends in home designing.

Aside from their “education, experience, and examination”, a good interior designer has a good eye. You may check their portfolio to see for yourself or ask around about the designer. In whatever design they do, it must have some appealing quality or what the French refer to as something that has a certain “je ne sais quoi.”

Home staging, on the other hand, is a process of making a property presentable to sell it faster. This is where interior design overlaps with home staging. Sellers prefer hiring a professional home stager with a deep understanding and knowledge of interior designing.

After all, who could be better in doing home staging than those who have a background in interior design? Home staging to some is a one-time-big-time process. This is because you must undergo staging before listing property to make sure you won’t lose prospective buyers the first time. It is hard to convince a buyer to get back to you once they jumped to another house and be head-over-heels attracted to it.

People may think staging and hiring a professional home stager is a waste of money, but the truth is, you are wasting a lot more money and effort if you did not prepare your house enough to compete with other houses in the market. Staged homes have a higher chance of selling faster than those that did not. A tight budget must not stop you from staging your house. You just need to prioritize and make yourself aware of the nature of the process. If you have familiarized yourself, you can spend your money wisely.

The purpose of home staging is to depersonalize your house while making it look like a comfortable place to live in. This includes changing the colors of the walls inside and out with a warm and neutral color. It also requires taking away a furniture or two to make a place look bigger. It will make you completely lose touch of your emotional attachment to your house by getting rid of all your personal stuff and replace it with things that could make way for buyers to imagine themselves living in it. It will conceal the imperfections that you didn’t mind for the past years or months that you stayed in the house.

Home staging involves professional and objective judgment of the stagers which comes from their skill and appreciation towards interior design. Do not be afraid to hire professionals. Reassure yourself with a wise background check of your prospective stager and in return, you are going to sell your property faster at a good price.

1: http://www.iida.org/content.cfm/what-is-interior-design