When I was 13 years old, I got the urge to decorate my own room as my breakout effort to establish my own identity and, with my mother’s permission, I painted my room bright red.
There was nothing too odd about that, but convinced that the room looked too stark and needed some pattern, I dressed the two windows with drapes that I found in a storage trunk in the attic. The problem was that the drapes were a green, yellow and pink floral print on a white background. Can you visualize the end result?
A couple of years later when my family decided to sell our home and the first prospective buyers visited, the wife entered that room and exclaimed, “Oh, my God!” My mother was convinced that it was my room alone that scared them away.
I had never heard the term “too taste specific” until I got into real estate, and lately I’ve been hearing it a lot. Maybe it’s that, in the recession, homes for sale have to appeal to the widest possible audience. And indeed, conventional wisdom has told us that the more “neutralized” the interior, the better.
But maybe we’ve taken that principle too far.
I’ve noticed that some interior designers who blog have started posting their frustrations with clients who are timid about expressing their true selves in decorating for fear of offending some future home buyer. Flying in the face of “vanilla and white bread,” more decorators are now advising their clients not to trap themselves into an existence of visually blah surroundings, waiting for the approval or at least the tolerance of some one else.
In support of stepping out of neutrality when decorating, one interior designer recently blogged that “Life is over faster than anyone wants to admit. So, leave a mark already!”
Another blog posting I liked from a savvy realtor was, “When a home stager insists that something is ‘too taste specific,’ what she’s really saying in a polite way is that it’s just too damned ugly to remain!”
A couple of interesting case studies can be found at:
Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at 914-522-2076.
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