Market Ready

Q. What sort of bedding looks best for showings?

A. Although you might not feel like making the bed on busy mornings, it’s essential to do so — with care — when your home is on the market. That might seem obvious, but Wendy Jackson, senior vice president for international sales at Nest Seekers International in New York, said she had encountered numerous apartments where owners had left the bedroom a mess for showings.

“It doesn’t show well if it looks like somebody has just gotten out of bed,” she said, adding that first impressions are everything, and an unsightly tangle of blankets is off-putting. “The bedroom is important because people will visualize themselves there, and the possibility of resting there,” she said.

To make the bed appear as clean and serene as possible, Ms. Jackson suggested, use white sheets and neutral-colored covers. “You don’t have to spend a lot of money,” she said. “You can have one crisp white set of sheets that you buy on sale.”

Pillowcases are particularly important, she noted, because they’re usually visible above the covers, so buy a new set. “I usually even press them when I’m doing a staging,” she said.

Jay Hart, a principal of the New York home staging company Sold With Style, says it is also important to think about how your bed will appear in listing photos. “When you have a picture of the bedroom, the bed takes up a significant amount of the photograph,” he said. “So it’s going to say a lot about the room.”

In general, when it comes to photographing the bed, “lighter colors are better than darker colors, and simple patterns are better than complex patterns,” he said, noting that he usually sticks with solid colors. If you’re not sure how photogenic your bed is, he added, “just snap a photo with your smartphone and look.”

Mr. Hart noted that it was possible to give a bed a more luxurious feel by adding layers of bedding and pillows. “Think of a five-star hotel — there are lots of folds and lots of pillows,” he said. “There are sheets, a duvet, a throw, standard pillows, euro shams and throw pillows.”

And, to borrow another practice from the hotel industry, he said, “do that turn-back of the linen to expose your white sheets.”

Mr. Hart also pointed out the importance of considering what was at the head of the bed. “Ideally, you have a headboard, either upholstered or wooden,” he said. “But if you don’t, a really large piece of art works well, too. The key is that you want something of substance behind the bed to anchor it.”

Hanging art and buying new bedding might seem like a lot of trouble to prepare for showings, but Mr. Hart says such steps are worthwhile. “Nobody’s actually climbing into that bed” when they visit, he acknowledged. “But it’s all about the feeling of the environment you create.”

TIM McKEOUGH

Original Article: The New York Times

Filed under: PRESS by RoshniShah
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