The Stagers shows experts redesigning properties for sale

Lucy Hyslop
Sun

Diplomacy is needed in the world of home staging, where experts redesign rooms in a bid to make a property on the market sell quicker — and for more. “Eww, that’s gross,” a designer thinks of the tastes of one homeowner who’s right in front of him; “This is nice, this is great” is what comes out of his mouth.

Precious caught-on-camera confessions like this are why HGTV’s new show, The Stagers, starting July 1, makes for such riveting viewing. Much like Sesame Street sneaks in education at the same time as it entertains, viewers will pick up a raft of design tips just by following the creative day jobs of said designer, Matthew Finlason, and the other characters who work with Dekora, Vancouver‘s burgeoning home-staging firm.

The series is also a coup for the city: It’s the first time that HGTV has picked up a show for a national and U.S. audience (airing on July 22) that was shot entirely in Vancouver. From Dunbar to British Properties, from Kitsilano to Mount Pleasant, the city will be representing all types of homes (new condos to old properties, dated décor to weird layouts) throughout the entire continent. “We’re really happy about that,” says Cal Shumiatcher, executive producer at the series’ makers, Paperny Films. “There was no need to sanitize or hide Vancouver, but we don’t go out of our way to say Vancouver either, so we’ll say upscale neighbourhood, for example, rather than Shaughnessy. That way all audiences can relate to the show.”

Filming The Stagers was a “slam dunk,” Shumiatcher adds. “We didn’t have to fake anything,” he says. “In most of these shows you do have to fake the time pressure, for example, but it’s so real for home stagers — they genuinely have five days to dress up a house so all we really had to do is film them. All of the pressure and the drama are all real. It falls down to storyline and characters — we felt positive about both right from the start.”

Characters include the dynamic design duo of Maureen Powers and Bridget Savereux. A mother-and-daughter team with 30 years of experience between them, the pair suddenly had to juggle a film crew (wires, people, microphones) into the mix. “We’re used to having nobody there — just Bridget and I, which is nice and peaceful,” Powers explains, adding that they had to verbalize their decisions for the camera. “We’re so in tune with each other that we’re not used to talking about our design choices,” Savereux says, “but it was important to speak about things so that the public can get a lot of information and tips. If you’re a good designer you can explain it instantly. You have it in your mind.”

In one episode, they have to deal with a dated condo and a spiral staircase that comes into the middle of the living room. They rely on tactics (greenery or art work, for example) to divert the eye to a more interesting area. “You’re constantly trying to make things brighter and lighter,” Powers adds, “make the energy flow through space.” (For Powers, staging and feng shui are linked. “It’s an art that has been around for thousands of years — how to promote something, to make the best to attract energy — and that’s what you are also doing in staging,” she explains.)

“You really see the grit of how we have to handle the client when they are in the space, be sensitive to their needs and their connection to their home,” Savereux adds, “but we also have to be pretty clear about what the issues might be such as design problems, or lighting problems, or paint issues or whatever. At the end of the process though, owners are so ecstatic and the biggest stamp of approval is when we get a client saying that they wish they weren’t moving.”

The key areas, Savereux explains, are to neutralize, declutter, clean and depersonalize the space to that it appeals to as many people as possible.

The episodes show the designers head for Dekora’s 10,000-square-foot warehouse near Second Narrows Bridge, where there are endless rows of different styles of furniture to be hired out for the staging process. It’s a far cry from when co-founder Ron Sowden started with a small home garage full of stuff and a turnover of $88,000 in 2003, to recent projected sales of $2 million, a staff of 40 and a staging tally of more than 1,000 homes.

“Some people find it hard to imagine reconfiguring the space,” he explains, “and that’s why home staging works, because we don’t require them to imagine it — we show it to them. We take away the difficult leap from here’s what it is, to here’s what it could be.”

A veteran of the film industry where he designed sets for movies such as Paycheck and X-Men 2, he says his career naturally segued into home staging or “set decorating for the real-estate market.”

He also found life in front of the camera just as rewarding as behind the scenes. “It’s a totally different experience,” he quips, “but I turned out to be a natural ham.”

The Stagers airs July 1 on HGTV. Visit Dekora at www.dekora.com. The website for Balance 3 Living Design, Maureen Powers and Bridget Savereux’s firm, is www.livingdesign.ca.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Don Cayo
Sun

Canada‘s establishment bankers have come up with a way for consumers and businesses to protect themselves from fraudsters who deal at Money Mart or other cheque-cashing companies that don’t belong to the Canadian Payments Association.

The problem, as regular readers will know, is that when someone cashes a legally stopped cheque at Money Mart — and this seems to happen a lot — the company often sues the issuer of the cheque, not the casher. This is true even in cases of obvious fraud, as in the frequent scenario where a scammer pretends to lose a cheque, then cashes both the original and the replacement.

As noted in previous columns, the Bills of Exchange Act, which is more than a century old, does include an arcane provision for “crossed cheques” that, in theory, offer some protection.

In law, crossing a cheque by drawing two parallel lines across the face of it means that only the recipient can cash it. In fact, this law is so little understood in Canada — though the practice is routine in places like the U.K. and Australia — that this is generally impractical. The lines are often misunderstood. They’re thought to void the cheque, not limit the cashing options so a third-party cheque-cashing company like Money Mart can’t sue the issuer if it’s rash enough to accept a properly stopped cheque.

Thus many people won’t accept such cheques, and tellers at many mainstream institutions don’t know enough to process them for payment.

In addition, the Canadian Payments Association, which represents banks, credit unions and trust companies, worries that the parallel lines could interfere with the electronic scanners that handle virtually all cheques these days. So I can see why it discourages crossed cheques, though I’d still advocate them if there weren’t a workable alternative.

Fortunately, however, there is a workable alternative.

True to its word, the CPA has taken this issue seriously since my first columns on the subject. On Thursday Roger Dowdall, the association’s vice-president of communications and education, wrote to me with a solution.

Dowdall cites a section of that same old Bills of Exchange Act that says, “When a bill (legalese for a cheque) contains words prohibiting transfer, or indicating an intention that it should not be transferable, it is valid between the parties thereto, but it is not transferable.”

He suggests writing “for deposit to the account of the named Payee only” or similar words on the face of any cheque you’re concerned about — for example, a post-dated cheque for work not done yet, or a payment to someone you don’t know very well.

“The phrase could be written on the memo line of the cheque, or at the top middle of the cheque (i.e. between the account holder’s information that is normally in the upper-left corner and the date, which is in the upper-right corner), provided that it does not interfere with any key information on the cheque, such as the name of the Payee, the amount, the date, etc.

“This wording would be clearly understood by all parties, and would therefore avoid the potential confusion resulting from crossing cheques.

“Financial institutions have reviewed this option and agree it is much more workable than crossing cheques would be.”

Dowdall’s solution is in line with what a number of readers have suggested over the months I’ve been writing about this issue. I did pass on some of those suggestions, though a bit timidly because I am neither a banker nor a lawyer and I didn’t know if any of these wordings had been legally vetted or tested in court.

I suppose a court challenge of Dowdall’s wording could still lie ahead. But if this solution is good enough for his group’s corporate members, it’s good enough for me. So that’s the wording that’ll I’ll use on the handful of cheques I write to strangers or limited acquaintances each year.

In fact, I see no reason why this phrase can’t be printed on my cheque blanks next time I pick up a new batch.

Meanwhile, there’s still every reason for MPs of every stripe to support the private member’s bill put forward two weeks ago by Vancouver East MP Libby Davies. It would put an end to Money Mart’s ability to routinely pursue people who are already victims rather than the scammers who victimized them.

While I hope and trust that businesses and consumers who see this column will take the recommended steps to protect themselves, it’s unreasonable to assume that the practice will be universally — or even widely — adopted any time soon. So Davies’s amendment will be needed for a long time to come.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008