This was published 1 year ago
Will colour-coded bookshelves help sell my home?
A friend is selling her home and has employed a stylist to help present the property for viewing. To her horror, said stylist has arranged her extensive book collection in colour-coded order. Should my friend resist?
T.P., Balmain, NSW
Some home-sellers do this, don’t they? Hire a stylist to redecorate their home, refurnish their home, zhuzh up their home so it no longer looks like their home. It looks like an IKEA showroom with a SÖDERHAMN sofa and a MÖRBYLÅNGA table and a bunch of fake, empty-paged, colour-coded books lined up on a SKRUVBY bookcase.
And I guess some home-buyers fall for that, don’t they? They’ll pay good money to buy a bland, generic property that might once have been inhabited by The Sims. But not me, uh-uh. When I was house-hunting, I was always drawn to houses that had a lived-in vibe. Places with human smells and cluttered rooms and holes punched in the wallboard with the word “MOTHER” scrawled underneath – they just seemed more charming. And affordable. Ideally, your friend needs to find that perfect in-between level of styling – enough to make the house look roomy and tasteful without it being so vacant it looks as if it’s about to get blasted in a nuclear test.
That’s why colour-coding a book collection is going too far: it’s judging a book by its colour. Books are the soul of a house: they need to look used and dishevelled, like a wall in a secondhand bookshop (without the gouty old bookseller lurking around the corner). Tell your friend to
put her collection back in a randomly arranged order. Otherwise, home-buyers may find it jarring and lose interest in the place – and your friend may end up selling a house with a hole punched in the wallboard and the word “STYLIST” scrawled underneath.
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Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.