I used to think home staging meant turning your house into a sterile hotel lobby.
Turns out, the buyers who fell hardest for properties I worked on weren’t responding to the emptiness—they were responding to what I’d call “strategic authenticity.” A realtor in Portland once told me she sold a cluttered artist’s loft in three days by removing seventy percent of the canvases but leaving the five best ones, plus the paint-splattered stool by the window. The buyers, both architects, said they could “feel the creative energy” but also “see themselves living there.” Here’s the thing: clutter isn’t really about quantity, it’s about intention. A shelf with forty-seven novels signals “I never edit my life,” but eight carefully chosen spines—maybe a worn Murakami, a dog-eared cookbook, a field guide to birds—that tells a story someone else wants to continue. I’ve seen people agonize over this distinction, and honestly, I get it, because the line feels arbitrary until you cross it.
The Thirty-Second Rule and Why It Probably Doesn’t Work for Everyone
Real estate photographers use this informal guideline: if a visitor’s eye can’t find a resting place within thirty seconds, the room fails. But wait—maybe that’s too rigid. I worked with a family in Austin whose teenage son collected vintage skateboards, about nineteen of them mounted on his bedroom wall. The staging consultant wanted them all gone. I suggested keeping three, arranged asymmetrically, with the wall anchors visible where the others had been. The buyer, a tech CFO with two kids, later said those empty anchors made him imagine his own children’s interests filling the space. It wasn’t perfect staging by the manual, but it worked because it suggested possibility without prescribing it.
The trick is understanding that clutter reads as visual noise, but personality reads as narrative. Remove the noise, keep the narrative. Easier said than done, I guess.
What Stays and What Goes When You’re Trying to Keep Your Actual Soul Intact
I’ve developed this loose hierarchy, though it shifts depending on the house. Definately keep: one signature piece per room (a grandmother’s quilt, a telescope by the window, a wall of family photos—but curated to maybe twelve frames, not fifty-three). Probably remove: anything multiplied beyond reason (seventeen throw pillows, eight remote controls on the coffee table, collections that sprawl). The gray zone is personal memorabilia. A friend staging her mother’s house after she moved to assisted living couldn’t bear to remove all the ceramic birds—there were hundreds, accumulated over forty years. We kept eleven, clustered on two shelves with breathing room around them, and suddenly they looked like a deliberate collection rather than a symptom of time passing. Buyers commented on them positively, which shocked us both. One woman said they reminded her of her own grandmother, which is exactly the kind of emotional projection you want—wait, maybe that sounds manipulative, but it’s really just allowing people to recieve the space on their own terms.
Here’s what nobody tells you: the stuff you remove doesn’t vanish, it goes into boxes in the garage or a storage unit, and sometimes sorting through it is harder than any other part of selling.
The Emotional Cost of Making Your Home Appealing to Strangers Who Haven’t Earned It Yet
A couple in Denver told me they felt like they were “erasing themselves” when they staged their home. They’d raised three kids there, hosted roughly two hundred dinners, nursed each other through illnesses. The staging process—boxing the kids’ artwork, removing the overflowing bookshelves, painting over the pencil marks tracking height on the doorframe—felt like grief. And I didn’t have a good answer for them, because it kind of is grief. But the house sold for forty-one thousand over asking, and they used that money for the down payment on a smaller place near their grandkids, and later the husband admitted the staging had helped him let go, made the house feel less like theirs before they had to hand over the keys. I’m not sure that’s a happy ending exactly, but it’s an honest one.
The balance you’re chasing is this: enough personality that the space feels lived-in and warm, enough neutrality that buyers can project their own lives onto it. It’s uncomfortable. You’re essentially performing a version of domesticity that’s true enough to be believable but edited enough to be aspirational. Sometimes I think about the Ikea catalog shoots, where they place a single mug of coffee on the table, one magazine, reading glasses at a casual angle—tiny signifiers of human presence without actual humans. That’s the aesthetic endpoint of staging, and honestly, it can feel a little dystopian when you’re living through it. But then the offers come in, and you remember it’s temporary. The clutter will return, just in someone else’s life, or yours in a new place. For now, you’re just holding space for transition, and maybe that’s enough.
