Designed to Sell

Call it “designing to sell” or “house doctoring,” but “redesigning” a home to sell quickly works—and more and more owners of upper-bracket homes are trying it. When homeowner and Realtor Scott Graham decided to sell his own Cedar Lake–area home, he wanted to sell it fast and list it for more than $1 million. He knew his late-1940s home had a great location, a popular open, loftlike floor plan, a recently renovated state-of-the art kitchen, and good bones, but he thought it needed to be “fine-tuned to elevate it to what it could be.”

With six weeks to redesign the home, Graham called upon Jay Nuhring, who had worked with some of his Coldwell Banker Burnet colleagues. “The first thing we did was ask ourselves, ‘What is this house?’ ” says Nuhring. “How are people going to look at it?” And more importantly, he adds, who would most likely buy this house?

The 5,000-square-foot rambler is located along a well-traveled road, on a slight hill, on a corner lot. “The front of the house is so public, it’s almost onstage with the amount of large windows so visible from the front,” says Nuhring. He and codesigner Todd Nelson let the midcentury architecture drive their vision: The house would make the greatest impact if a gallerylike, minimalist approach was taken—inside and out.

The designers prepared a list of what should be done and presented it to Graham. It included everything from changing the color of the exterior trim (which had just recently been painted) to landscaping recommendations to how spaces should be used, where furniture and artwork should be placed, and new lighting needs. “The new kitchen set the tone, and we wanted to get the rest of the house up to that level of sophistication,” says Nuhring. Though Nuhring and Nelson used some of Graham’s furnishings, which Graham says were more “pop and youthful,” the designers wanted fewer pieces and  “more emphasis on scale, proportion, and substance” to support the design of the home without compromising its architecture. With the addition of some borrowed and rented furnishings, Graham says the redesign took a more elegant approach.

The result? The home sold in four days. “The difficult part of this was trusting them,” says Graham, who, as the listing agent, was able to experience the opening-weekend vibe firsthand. “The design emphasized the space,” says Graham. “The furniture and artwork were the costars—but the house was the star.”