Full or partial property styling: which does your house need?

One of the first questions on a walk-through is whether the whole house needs doing. Often it doesn't. Sometimes it absolutely does, and it helps to know which before the quotes start coming in.

The short version

If you're still living there and your furniture is reasonable, you probably need partial styling: we edit what you've got and fill the gaps. If the house is empty, or what's in it is fighting the property, you need the full job.

Most houses are fairly obviously one or the other. The interesting ones sit in between, and we'll get to those.

Partial styling, for houses you're still living in

Most of the work is taking things away. A good share of the furniture goes into storage, the benches get cleared, the family photos come down, and the rooms finally get to look their real size. Then we bring in what's missing. That's usually less furniture than people expect and more of the layer on top: a lamp, a rug, a decent piece of art on the wall where the wedding photos used to hang.

It's the cheaper end of the range. On one real job, a two-bedroom apartment where we edited what was already there, the six-week campaign came to $3,000.

Worth being upfront about the catch. You'll be living in something close to a display home for six weeks. Beds made, benches clear, the dog's bowl out of sight every time there's an inspection. Most people manage it. Some find it harder than they expected, and that's better known before you start than in week three.

Full styling, for empty houses

Every room built from nothing. Furniture, rugs, lighting, art, objects, the lot.

Empty rooms are hard to read. Walk into a bare second bedroom and you can't easily tell whether a queen bed fits, and plenty of buyers won't stop to work it out. A furnished room answers the question before anyone has to ask it.

This is the upper end. Two real jobs for scale: an empty three-bedroom house at $5,000, and a four-to-five bedroom family home with every room built from scratch at $8,000. Same six weeks in both.

The ones in between

Some houses are half-empty. The vendor has already moved most of their things out, or what's left is a mismatched mix of whatever didn't fit on the removalist's truck.

These get worked out on the day. Sometimes a piece or two of what's there earns its place and stays. More often it's cleaner to clear the lot and start again. The number of rooms is one of the main things that moves the price, so if the budget's tight, ask about concentrating on the rooms buyers judge a house by: the living area, the kitchen and dining, and the main bedroom.

What stays the same either way

Furniture is the part every stylist can supply, and most of it comes out of the same few Melbourne warehouses. What changes how a house feels at an inspection is what sits on top of it. Rod collects, so the lamps, glass, ceramics and art that go into your house come from his own collection. That holds whether we're filling five empty rooms or adding the finishing layer to your own furniture.

Working out which yours is

Walk through your house as if you were a buyer seeing it for the first time, and be honest about what you'd notice first. If it's the clutter, you're probably partial. If it's the echo, you're full.

Or let us do it. We'll come out, walk through the property with you and give you a fixed number before you commit to anything. If you'd like a sense of the range first, here's what property styling costs in Melbourne, along with the jobs those figures came from.

Get in touch and we'll arrange a time to come and have a look.