Back in the day it took endless hours of hunting at numerous different places to create an appealing unique look in your home. Interior designers were the one source for creating stylish looks and customizing fabric and color selections. Places like Ethan Allen, The Emporium and Macy’s had the market for a polished set but their furnishings didn’t mix and match too well if a person wanted a more individualized look.
Antique stores were the source for pieces of character, durability and vintage wear because they literally had it built in. There was no Internet to gleam ideas from and see what everyone was doing. Our design world moved along at a much slower pace, the world leaned primarily on interior decorators and designers for their expertise.
And Then Came Pottery Barn
Then it shifted. Pottery Barn became a wonderful overload of senses and ideas. It had new furniture that looked new along with new furniture that looked old. It carried white, honey colored, and dark wood furnishings. There was so much variety and it all looked great together. It was the perfect blend of nice furnishings at reasonable prices.
PB successfully makes everyone’s home look ‘unique’ even though it all looks like Pottery Barn.
They offer a one stop shop for all things home with multiple choices in woods, fabrics, sizes, metals, distressed to not distressed, trendy to traditional. And all the accessories you can dream of. You can create a great look in much less than half the time it took back in the day. And if you really don’t have the time you can flip open their catalog and mimic what you see right there.
They show you ways to mix and match their items if you’re more into an eclectic look or you can buy all pieces matching. They distress many of their pieces and use darker metals on hinges so that your brand new piece looks like it may have come from an antique store or was a family heirloom. They design with the designer in mind, knowing a room can shine with slight differences in table height, and chairs that go well together and all fit around the same table with a uniform seat height yet each have their own look.
Their fabric choices are endless and cater to all styles from formal to casual to leather to non-staining kid proof ultra-suede. You can upgrade your couch from the basic fillings to higher end, longer lasting fill, you can slipcover most anything they have making changing up the look of a room a much easier and less expensive task.
Their accessories take your home from day to day to seasonal wow. The amount of pillows that come and go from their catalogs are endless and their holiday and summer season items are hard to resist. Anyone can find appealing bedding anytime in their store. They carry classic simple looks, to more elegant designs, to hotel-like looks, to colorful, cheery floral prints.
And if you really don’t have the time or you believe you don’t have the knack to put together a look, they have designers on staff ready to help you through the whole process.
Kids rooms are even lively and fun and more put together then ever before. Fun sheets and wallpaper were as far as the room decor went when I was a kid. Now there’s a whole new world for kids rooms with never ending furniture options and accessories that fill two entire catalogs dedicated to kids and teens.
All this said, the biggest reason I really love Pottery Barn is that it makes my job easier.
The Biggest Reason I Love Pb Is It Makes My Job Easier
I have yet to meet a seller that isn’t interested in getting the highest possible price for their home. Whether they are asking for my opinion on how to achieve this task or simply saying the price they want, the easiest way to get everyone on the same page is to say that buyers go for the Pottery Barn look. Everyone in this day and age knows Pottery Barn.
If you want top dollar on your home, mimic Pottery Barn. Meaning, create a space that the majority of people walking into will love. So if you have an Eichler or otherwise mid century modern home do not fill it with PB furnishings, mimic the motto.
Create a Look That Is Well Liked and Appeals to the Masses.
Create a look that is well liked and appeals to the masses and makes the task of furnishing (and buying) a home much less daunting. If your home looks like a catalog how does the open house go-er feel when they walk in? Hopefully they feel as good as they do as when they walk into a PB store.
Create spaces that invoke calm comforting happy thoughts.
Remove thoughts of ‘what will I do with this particular space?’ Remove thoughts of what could be and paint the picture of what is. Bay Area buyers do not have time to think about these things. They’d love to but there’s just not enough hours in the day here.
This Is Why I Stage Every Home I Sell
In the Bay Area, the number of buyers that have the time and desire to buy a fixer continues to diminish. And the number of buyers that want brand new or very new continues to rise. I hear all the time… “this house needs too much work,” even in homes that are less than 20 years old.
As someone that has grown up in the Bay Area this is crazy to me. We are not a new community, the entire Peninsula all the way down into San Jose was developed largely in the 1960’s with plenty of homes being even older because these communities were the weekend get-a-ways for San Francisco’s elite.
If you have not updated your home in the last 5 years with the latest trending looks in cabinets, flooring and lighting and you do not want to, I highly recommend updating your paint and staging your home in part or entirely.
Hire an Expert
Follow the advice of your Realtor, that is why you hire a professional – for their professional opinion and advice. The best sales result from the most well packaged product.
