Charlas Location is a series of live interviews that we carry out in our Instagram account.
On November 6th we held an exclusive interview with Natalia Xaubet, commercial set designer, interior designer, decorator and creator of her own interior design studio located in Punta del Este. These were the main points of the talk:
What is Home Staging?
“Home staging began in the United States, where an interior designer realized that by intervening in spaces, homes sold much faster. This is a field that starts with decoration, but decorating is not the same as staging. Decorating is giving personality to a space, whereas staging is about depersonalizing a space to try to attract the widest possible audience. You have to create generic spaces that we all like, because if you put too much of an imprint on a home, it stops being commercial. A property almost always has to be lowered in price a little and generally, that is much more than what we would invest in a setup, for example, which is one of the options we offer at Location.”
Fine tunning
“I propose three types of Home Staging. The first would be the Fine-Tuning, where you strategically see what would be ideal to improve, which can be openings, baseboards, finishes, lighting, quick change of pavement. The idea of this home staging is also to take photographs and productions that will be on the web, where in the first 90 seconds you have to generate the impact. In those first seconds the person will be deciding if they want to buy that house or apartment, or if they will move on to the next one. The ideal is to generate a buying experience, without forgetting all the senses that the human being has, which are many more than those that a web page can cover.”
Home Staging Virtual
“In Virtual Home Staging we can render properties that have potential where people are open to doing work. Whether it is an old house that has very small spaces where walls can be knocked down to create larger spaces, a kitchen that is from the period, showing the before and after. Showing the potential so that the person does not have to think about all that, which is not their profession.”
Advice for inhabited homes
“This service can be remote or in person. It is a quick facelift to depersonalize, neutralize and show more of a product for sale. What we want to sell is the house, not the furniture. People think that they can put a nice tablecloth and a vase on the furniture and that's it, and they don't understand that this is getting in the way because it actually generates a focus of attention on the vase and not on the view out the window. We have to direct the client's gaze, placing the elements strategically.”
How do you work with old properties?
What is done is to take care of, enhance and accompany the aesthetics of the property. If it is an old, period architecture, the person who is going to buy it is looking for that, so there is no reason to change it, if anything it is to improve it.
Interior design for commercial premises
“When we work with commercial premises, we interior designers think about the message that each brand has. The brand cannot say one thing and the interior design says another. The important thing is to always promote and reproduce the same thing: on the website, on Instagram, in the interior design, in the cards, in the music you play, in the aromas. If you go to see a property, for example, and you arrive at the place and there is music in the background, they welcome you with a canapé and you have a glass of champagne, all of this creates a symphony of things where it is very difficult for the person to say no afterwards.”
“Entering a “hard” place puts people in a cold state of mind, so how is that person going to buy? What speech are you going to have to soften that person up? Instead, with all that imprinting, you create a shopping experience.”
