Home Staging 101: Using Color Combinations to Neutralize Spaces

Often times when I am asked to give an estimate on a vacant home I give clients recommendations beyond what rooms to stage and what furniture to rent. If the home decor is too personal I will often tell the client to repaint a room, remove wallpaper or replace outdated carpet in certain rooms. I am not paid for this advice but I realize that simply adding furniture will not transform the space into something less personal. What can you do then as a stager when a client's home is overly personal or due to time and/or budget constraints they simply cannot get all the tasks done before the staging day?

 I often use color combinations to play down rooms that are not neutral and to tie colors from room to room to create flow to a home's decor.  I recently had the pleasure of helping a home seller in Berwyn, Chester County PA get his home ready for sale. He was relocating for work and had a week to get the home on the market.

He was a pleasure to work with- he had the carpets steam cleaned and the wallpaper in the dining room removed and the walls freshly painted. There was not time however to repaint the kitchen that opened into the family room.

The color he had chosen for the family room was a lovely gold but it was a deeper color than the rest of the rooms in the home and gave this space a boxy feel (the value of the color was off). The kitchen was a pale plum or purple color and was a light watery pastel- since the rooms were side by side the difference in the depth of color felt awkward making the family room fee heavier and the kitchen feel like it was floating away. I recommended repainting the kitchen a green color that would work well with the rest of the home's decor and to make it the same depth (or value) as the family room. Since there was not time to do this I incorporated the color from the Family room into the kitchen to give more balance to the space.

One simple trick you can do to balance the color in a space is to use the complement of the main color in the space or the main color in the adjoining room. Since the color in the family room was gold and the color in the kitchen was plum, I introduced yellow and golds into the kitchen since yellow and purple are complements. If the kitchen was green and the family room was red I would have brought red tones into the space. If the family room was teal then I would have introduced a splash of this color into the purple kitchen to create more balance to the space.

Try this the next time you are staging or simply redecorating your home. Below are some photographs to show this concept.