We might be deep in winter chill but life must go on, especially for realtors. This is the gloomiest season of the year, and properties aren’t exactly in their best light. Still, with the right styling, you can offer prospective buyers and renters the promise of a warm, cosy home they’re sure to love.

Before you get into styling suggestions, make sure you select the right styling team. A good stager isn’t all about the money. They want to be sure you’re happy, your seller is impressed, and your sales prospect is convinced.

Some stagers will offer to visit the site and give a free consultation that includes a comprehensive quotation. They will also offer to install all your rentals and to pick them up once you close your sale. This saves you time, money, and labour while building rapport and trust.

Now that you’ve selected the right team, you can work with the stylist to get the right fit for your space and theme. There are certain styling motifs that are popular this year, and your interior designer can customise them to suit your needs.

Your first instinct will be to pile on the portable heating. While this is great for comfort and will keep your prospects in the house longer, it doesn’t say much in terms of style. Plus, since it’s a winter purchase, your buyer will probably be looking for intrinsic heating, so a temporary furnace is more likely to dissuade them than convince them.

Instead, use smart décor to warm up the room. Fabric is a great way to add warmth to a room. It looks soft, which evokes a warm fuzzy feeling, and the varying textures can create a feeling of ease and comfort. In practical terms, fabric holds on to heat, so the room will physically feel warmer. In your living room, you can incorporate fabric through heavy curtains, upholstered furnishings, and lush carpets.

For the bedroom, go all out with throw pillows and bedroom cushions. Get textured bedding, ideally wool and knitted quilts that evoke the spirit of grandma on a cold winter night. This season, you’re selling the comfort of home rather than the sensuality of summer. That will come later. You can also consider artificial fur rugs. They will offer warmth without offending sensibilities.

To give your walls their own layer of warmth, consider textured wallpaper, such as grasscloth or bamboo. This might be tricky at the staging level since it’s not easy to uninstall. Consider framing a swatch and placing it as a wall accent, just to show your client what it could look like. Other natural options are silk, cork, and rice paper wall coverings.

Natural light is a big selling point in any home. With so little sunlight in the winter, your house might end up seeming dark and uninviting. Light things up with ambient fixtures. Forget the distant chandeliers and wall sconces. They suggest a cool elegance that will only heighten the winter chill.

Instead, use glass light fixtures that offer lots of sparkle and reflection, making the room seem larger and more cheerful. You can also use close-quarters lighting like desk lamps and floor lamps. As your prospect walks by them, they will physically feel the heat that the lamps emit, and this will warm them up psychologically as well. Plus, you can use the lamps to highlight particularly attractive home features.

Couple your warm, sparkling lights with large mirrors, and position them to reflect a beautiful outdoor view of a wide open space. It could be the seaside, a long elaborate driveway, or a well-manicured garden. The overall effect will make the room seem larger and bring in more light from the outdoors.

Being a drizzly winter, there’s sure to be a little smell of damp, no matter how thoroughly you cleaned the house. Mask the smell while also creating ambience by placing a scented candle centrepiece on a low coffee table. It heightens cosy sensations that detract from the winter chill.

Finally, bring the heat with warm fiery colours. Echo invigorating flames with tones of mustard, rust, and orange.  You can even go metallic with gold and copper accents. Since you can’t paint a show-house, inject the colour through cushions and accessories. With these starting pointers and a good designer, your winter home will be staged and sold in no time.

To know more about property Styling, please visit: http://www.pabs.com.au/property-styling/