Staging The Home Office

With the advent of the internet, entrepreneurship and work from home positions have catapulted many families into a home office based lifestyle. If your client has the space for a home office, it's important to emphasize the space. It will be a huge appeal to many home buyers, and if it's just for your client who doesn't plan on selling, making their office a sanctuary is important. It's where they work every day and you want to make sure they love it. You'll want the home office to be slightly different from the rest of the house. It's supposed to feel like it's own space where your client can sneak away to, to relax and finally get some work done. In this chapter, we'll go over some great tips to staging and decorating your clients office space.

THEME:

When decorating your client's home office, it's important to emphasize on a theme in this space. It's one of the rooms that doesn't have to perfectly match with the rest of the house. You want it to be your client's sanctuary space. Where they can get away, and feel like they are in a new setting, so they can focus on work and not feel too distracted by being at home. Discuss with your clients the settings that they absolutely love, maybe ones that may not suit the rest of the house, but can be incorporated into their office space. It's really important to get a moodboard created for your client with photos saved from Pinterest to create a board of themes they love and work around it.

STORAGE:

Office spaces are for storage and you want to make sure there is lots of it. Especially if the home is going on the market for sale. You want an office to feel de-cluttered and easy to work in, or it could become a place of frustration for your client, which leads to a lack of productivity for their business. Get rid of as many unnecessary knick-knacks as possible, and store away everything else. You want to keep to the basic furniture pieces, and only add extra to balance the room. Your first goal should be to only have the rug, desk, and chair, then add additional seating and book cases to help fill out the office. You don't want to add too much furniture and make it feel heavy in the room, go light with the furniture, make sure it's balanced throughout the whole room, then decorate it with basic pieces that help pull the full theme together. With storage and organization, the office will look much cleaner and user-friendly. 

LIGHTING:

If your client has an office that has a lot of natural light, make sure you play it up with mirrors throughout the room. Don't drape heavy fabric over the windows and cover up the natural light. It will make the space more attractive to work in if it's brightened up, especially if your client wants a dark color combination in her room. (Dark navy office spaces are trendy right now - you NEED a lot of lighting in spaces like this.) If your client's office doesn't have a lot of natural light coming in, be sure to use lighting fixtures wherever you can in the room to brighten it up.