Accent Chair Furniture

When staging condominiums there are fundamental principles which MUST be applied. Too often sellers believe the art of home staging and condo staging is exactly the same thing. This way of thinking will cause them to make their FIRST mistake . . . which could result in their condo sitting along side countless others . . . long after the buyers have gone home!

The following is a list of additional mistakes to avoid when staging your condo for sale:

Think Square Footage – Many condominiums have limited space. When planning your furniture layout, instead of thinking square footage . . . think square inch, and make each one count!

Size Really Does Matter – When shopping for furniture focus on scale and proportion, NOT bigger is better! Oversized furniture may look great on the showroom floor, but when you get it home it will look much different. You will swear that the “elephant in the room” is definitely not what you ordered!

Flex Areas – Condo living calls for carefully planned, creatively designed, multifunctional spaces known as flex areas. Because of the growing demand to meet the diverse needs of today’s condo buyer, more and more manufacturers are offering proportionately scaled, multipurpose furniture to their lines. They include upholstered slipper chairs that fold out into guest beds, ottomans that serve as extra seating and storage, high-low tables that instantly transform from cocktail tables into dining tables for entertaining . . . just to name a few. And for the savvy targetted condo buyer, staging a multi media/home office area is always advisable.

Defining Spaces – Whether you prefer the clean, contemporary lines of ultra urban or the graceful warm feel of timeless traditional – remember to use COLOR to define your spaces and create memorable WOW effects. Too often sellers believe that by keeping the walls neutral, it will make the limited space of a condo look larger. Actually the opposite is true. By bumping out a few accent walls with well chosen COLORS you not only will add excitement to the room, but visually add depth, giving the illusion that the space is larger than it is.

Presentation Is Everything – Choose fewer, but larger, more dynamic artwork and accessories. This is one of the most frequently made mistakes by sellers who believe you should do quite the opposite. Just remember . . . scale down your furniture and scale up your artwork and accessories to successfully stage a condo with limited space. Your presentation and end result will certainly be more dramatic . . . and memorable!

Chairs as you can imagine have a long history, for as long as there has been man (and woman) there has been the need to sit down on something comfortable, or as comfortable as was available, affordable and most importantly perhaps “allowable”. Why “allowable”, well throughout history chairs have reflected the status of the person sitting on them. The size, decoration and sheer ornateness of the chair saying a lot about the person sitting in it. Indeed in classical times to the time of the pharaohs, the chair was reserved for the high and mighty, only kings, lords and bishops were allowed chairs at all, the rest of the populace had to do with sitting on chests, benches or stools. The church and the chair have an even deeper connection, as the word “chair” derives from the Latin “cathedra”, the connection being the designation of a church that was the “seat” of a bishop as a cathedral. The chair however goes far further back than Latin however, the Egyptians having created some highly ornamental chairs for their pharaohs, while the Ancient Greeks way back in 1400BC were building chairs with four sturdy wooden legs, their design, the klismos being adopted by the Romans who introduced it in all the territories they conquered. Chairs were developed rich carvings and polychromatic surface treatments for the important members of society, but by the mid 1650’s chairs became common and were often upholstered. By the mid 1750’s most carpenters and chair designers had got the message that the chair should not only look good, but should be actually be nice to sit on too, hence chairs that hugged the contours of the human body were produced. These chairs had bow shaped backs and curved legs, the arm rests were padded (and in many cases richly embroidered too). It was incidentally, during this period that the ‘chaise lounge’, the precursor of the sofa was developed, this being a chair on which a lady could recline. The French too are said to have a great effect on the evolution of the chair, the first truly lightweight and comfortable chairs being developed by French chair designers. Their efforts sparked off a whole class of upholstered chairs, including sleeping chairs, armchairs, wing chairs, and a chairs characterized by having seat heights more convenient for uses other than at a dining table or desk, e.g. slipper chairs and lounge chairs. In Victorian England the legs of chairs were covered in many cases, as it was feared that they too closely resembled those of a women and as such might inflame the senses… Chair construction methods have changed dramatically over the years too. During the 18th century, before furniture production passed largely into the realms of mass production and of factories, chairs were made with even more curves than before, a process that required considerable more material, the curved sections, the legs and backs, being usually sawn out of solid wood in one piece. In fact, the progress from straight (and sometimes turned legs) to shapes such as the cabriole and the klismos, and the development of designs not requiring stretchers, (these relying on other techniques like knee blocks and corner blocks) can be followed as a logical timeline up to the point where commercial pressures for continual change and innovation resulted in the riot of revival styles that characterized the 19th century. Of all the types of furniture, the chair in fact presents the greatest structural challenges, as they have to address the inherently weak part of a chair’s construction, the joint between the seat and the back leg, an area especially strained when the occupant leans or tilts backwards. So the humble chair has not only an interesting history, it also is a structural work of art too. Long live the comfy chair.