How to Stage a Living Room: Tips & Tricks from a Professional Stager

The living room is one of the most important rooms in your home — especially when it comes time to put your home on the market.

Potential buyers will imagine themselves spending cozy nights with their family, entertaining guests and family members, and relaxing and unwinding in this space, which means that staging your living room well is of the utmost importance when selling your house — just ask any real estate agent!

Helpful Tips for Staging Living Rooms

Before staging your living room (or hiring professional home stagers to do the job for you), read through this to-do list for successful living room staging to get some practical ideas and creative inspiration.

Depersonalize & Declutter

Most buyers want living rooms to feel comfortable, cozy, and lived-in — they want to imagine themselves living in your home. However, personal items, like family photos on the walls, knick-knacks displayed on every shelf, and an overflowing toy basket, will just make your living room feel cluttered and detract potential buyers from paying attention to the room’s appealing focal points.

Instead, trade out photos for artwork and knick-knacks for tasteful decor, and put any additional “clutter,” like a dog bed, books, and board games, into a storage unit. Decluttering doesn’t just apply to the living room, for a complete list of must-do action items check out our declutter checklist.

Remove Bulky Furniture

If your living room furniture currently includes a giant recliner, an oversized sectional, a large television console, or any old, outdated furniture pieces — it might be time to put these pieces in storage and rent furniture instead. Heavy furniture — or too much furniture — makes it difficult for prospective buyers to imagine living in the space comfortably and can make the entire room feel small, cluttered, and cramped.

When staging your living room, consider incorporating a small sofa, coffee table, and two chairs into the design. We recommend flat-screen TVs over bulkier television consoles, but you can also replace your television set with a beautiful piece of artwork — it shows better than a smudged screen.

Touch Up Walls with Fresh Paint

Once you decide on a color scheme for your living room, it’s time to update the walls with a fresh coat of paint. Most home stagers recommend choosing a light, neutral color for living room staging — like white, gray, or beige — to make the room appear larger and appeal to the widest range of prospective buyers.

While painting the walls, be sure to look at the baseboards for scuffs, marks, and dust bunnies. While you might not mind a scuff mark or two on your baseboards — we guarantee a potential buyer will notice (and care about!) these little details.

Create a Focal Point

Once you’ve depersonalized your living room, removed the bulky furniture, and freshened up the walls with a bright coat of paint, the fun part begins — staging the furniture!

With all the clutter removed, it should be easy to identify a natural focal point in your living room where you can arrange seating. Does your living room have a gorgeous bay or bow window with a great view? Do you have a cozy, wood-burning fireplace you’d like to accentuate? Does your living room include an elegant chandelier ideally situated for seating underneath? A professional home stager can help you identify natural focal points in your living room and guide you on how to accentuate them with a sofa, chairs, and other decor.

Maximize Natural Light

Nothing is more unappealing to potential buyers than a dark living room that feels like a dungeon. Of course, having tons of large windows with sheer curtains is ideal for allowing natural light into your living room — but if you’re short on natural lighting, you’ll want to incorporate light fixtures, table lamps, and other artificial light sources to make the space feel brighter and more cheerful.

Another tip for maximizing sunlight in any space is to experiment with mirrors. Placing a large mirror on a wall across from a window will reflect the light and make the entire room appear much larger — plus, when the buyer glances in the mirror, they’ll be able to picture themselves in your house!

Incorporate Stylish Decor

When all the furniture pieces are arranged, it’s time to add color, style, and personality to your living room with a few well-placed decorations. Incorporate one (or more) of these ideas to embellish your space:

• Coffee Table & Side Table — The tables in your living room can be dressed up with fresh flowers, a few coasters, or aesthetic coffee table books.
• Fireplace Mantle — The fireplace mantle is an ideal spot to add a few eye-catching pieces of artwork, decor, or plants.
• Area Rug — A patterned, well-sized area rug placed underneath all the furniture can create a cohesive look for the seating space.
• Throws & Pillows — A cozy throw blanket or a few decorative pillows on the sofa can help tie the room together (just don’t go overboard).
• Plants & Greenery — Real plants or faux greenery can bring life and energy to your house, and they double as beautiful decor pieces that can brighter up an untouched corner of the room.

Sell Your House for More Money Quickly with a Professional Home Staging Company

If you’re looking for a professional stager that can help you incorporate all these living room staging tips listed above — we would be happy to help you at THE STAGING COMPANY. We offer professional home staging, vacation rental furnishing, and interior decorating services for homeowners and property owners in cities across Texas and Florida, including San Antonio, Tampa, and Orlando!

Contact us to request a quote for living room staging so that you can sell your home more quickly for more money. In the meantime, you can also look through our photo gallery of past projects to get some inspiration for your home staging project!