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What happens when an interior designer (Dee Bynum) and a visual merchandiser (Larry Wilkes) who both consider Halloween their favorite holiday get together? They generate six spooky yet sophisticated ideas for designing your mantel for the holiday. It may go without saying that all of these items are for sale at D. Luxe Home, located at Marathon Village. Mantel No. 1 demonstrates the importance of having items of different heights in a display. An old window, an eerie canvas, corbels that act as bookends, three of our Mixture candles, and a vase shaped like a head, into which we put (what else?) spindles, complete this vignette.   Mantel No. 2 gives a subtle nod to the Halloween holiday with its somber portraits, pair of gilded antlers and crusty balusters, old books with yellowed pages (spines faced toward the wall) and crystal candlesticks that surely came straight out of a haunted mansion.   Mantel No. 3 has graveyard written all over it with rustic crosses (one of them toppled over), a skull, antique portrait, candlesticks, and some translucent orbs--all sandwiched between a pair of nautilus-like corbels.   Mantel No. 4, with its mercury glass pumpkins, winks at Halloween, while its autumnal colors allow it to work throughout the season. Meanwhile, the balusters stacked in opposite directions and the wooden box on its side are a reminder to play around with unexpected orientations.   Mantel No. 5 puts our metal palmistry hand at center stage. Some of our witchy. amber apothecary bottles, feathers, and a doll head (or two) under a glass cloche complete this display and add elements of surprise.   Mantel No. 6 revisits this great antique window and teams up with a trio of clockfaces, a trio of candlesticks, a tray of frosty old bottles and a cloche under which a bunch of eyeballs is clustered.    Leave us a comment to let us know if you like the post and think we should do a Christmas edition?
Want more ideas for styling your home? See our post on how to create a beautiful and interesting tabletop here.
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 Note: The last three spaces pictured in this post were staged in collaboration with Julie Goad of Epiphany Design Studio. You've heard of soul readers, right? And how they can see past politeness and pretension and cut right to the heart of the matter? Or what about how a truly great hairdresser will be able to see your cowlick for what it is, instruct you to put away that photo of that movie star whose hair you're pining for, and work instead with the hair you have? Well, that's basically what home staging is like. It's like soul-reading for interiors; it's like a frank and fastidious hair stylist for the home. It's the most honest--and most flattering--interpretation of a space. And sometimes it's exactly what is needed to coax someone (read: potential buyer) into falling in love with a house. It's an art, a fantasy--and one of our favorite creative pursuits.  The staging work we do for our Nashville clients is usually a bit of a team effort in that it draws on both D. Luxe Home (our Marathon Village brick and mortar, from which we can pull furniture, artwork, and decorative items, including one-of-a-kind and specialty light fixtures) and Bynum Residential Design from which we derive our expertise on paint color and lighting selection. Simply put, we absolutely love staging Nashville's homes and luxury condominiums. This is something we do for clients prior to big events like home tours or other special occasions when a space really needs to sparkle. And of course we stage homes prior to hitting the market so that they can be seen in the best light. We usually end up staging the homes we've designed prior to selling them because it helps us to sell them but also because, selfishly, we get the best photos of our finished spaces this way. Once we've put all that effort into the design and build, it's very gratifying to take a house full circle and get to decorate it exactly the way we envisioned all along. This is the case in the photos shown throughout this post.  Staging is sort of a fantasy. More often than not, no one will ever really sleep in the bed you made or have a dinner party around the dining table that you positioned just so. But if we can help people--potential buyers usually--envision these sort of pleasant scenarios, then we've done what we were supposed to.  More than just fluffing pillows and arranging furniture, staging can include updating lighting in the home or even updating paint colors. We don’t really get into changing tile and those kind of things, but we can do quick surface things. Since we are all the time working through months-long building and renovation processes with our Bynum Design clients, we especially enjoy the instant gratification of staging.
Do you live in Nashville and need to have your home or condo staged to sell? We specialize in creating gorgeous spaces that make the very best of what a home has to offer. What happens when you completely remodel a beautiful old home, taking it from rundown to better-than-new? You throw a huge party to celebrate, that's what. And you stage the heck out of that home before the party so that it shows just as perfectly as you envisioned it showing the entire time you were designing it. This project is a perfect example of how well my two companies--D.Luxe Home and Bynum Residential Design--can complement one another. It was the team at Bynum Residential Design that worked so hard to reinvent this house, built in 1935, in Nashville's historic 12South (you can read about the remodel here), while we pulled furniture and accessories from D. Luxe Home to stage the finished home. Before we show you the pictures of this space staged, please feast your eyes on a few before and after photos:    Having seen that, you probably understand why we felt a big celebration was in order. It was important to me to stage this home myself prior to setting it loose on the market. I wanted to show it done up the way I wanted it. For instance, during the remodeling process, people all along thought the dining table would be awkward directly under the staircase. This way people could see for themselves that a dining table not only works here but works like a charm. We ended up getting some of the most positive feedback about that central room. The party was held on a beautiful Wednesday night at the end of April, and though we had plenty of potential buyers milling around, the house had in fact been claimed that morning by an out-of-state buyer who toured the house via her realtor's smartphone. We also invited plenty of friends and associates to enjoy beer, wine, and munchies, and we had DayNa Richele Photography capture the event. You may imagine that we'd do a lot of telling partygoers about the house during parties like these, but we mostly like to listen. We love hearing feedback, and it's feedback we can't get from people who have just looked at photos of our work, since people in the flesh can walk around and really say, "I like the size of this, or I like how this feels." It's really only possible to get that kind of feedback when a house is staged. Otherwise it's just an empty house, and then people don't really know how to use those rooms.
This shindig was the best way to finalize our work at 903 Lawrence Avenue, which did take longer than we would have liked. If you attended the party, we thank you so much for coming out and celebrating this home with us. (If you weren't here, we sure do hope you'll make it to our next party.) We tend to have enormous turnouts, and people stay. They don’t just turn around and leave. I think that’s a testament to the house as much as it is to our group. If you see furniture, lighting, or accessories you love, contact us or come by D. Luxe Home at Marathon Village, 1200 Clinton Street, Suite 5, Nashville, TN. Most everything is still for sale or can be special ordered for you. |
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