7 Ways to Make a Room Look More Spacious When Staging a Home

Home staging is both an art and a science, one that takes years of experience to find success. 

One of the more challenging aspects of home staging comes from maximizing space. Home buyers are constantly trying to figure out how much space they get for the money they pay. This means that the easier you make it for them to appreciate the size and function of a room, the faster you’ll sell. It is especially true in luxury real estate, where the price per square foot is higher.  

You can’t change your property’s square footage, but you can affect the perception of it, significantly – for better or worse. 

Remember, you only have seconds to impress home buyers, especially online. You don’t have the luxury of time.  And you certainly don’t want them to spend those precious first seconds trying to figure out the space. You want them to feel the excitement!

There are several secrets and tricks of the trade that can be used to make a space look significantly larger, from changing the color palette, to furniture size, reduction and placement, from decluttering, to flooding rooms with light and much more. 

So, let's dive into our seven best ways to make rooms look and feel more spacious. 

1. Colors Matter 

Color truly sets the tone and feel of a room. Therefore, it plays a major role in that very important first impression, when the deal is made or broken in the home buyer's mind. Color is magical – it can turn a boring property into a fabulous one. And best of all, it does so with a minimum of investment. 

If you're looking for ways to make a room look more spacious, lighter colors are your solution. Compared to darker color palettes, lighter colorways make a room feel open, accessible, and airy. Part of this is because dark colors absorb light and attract a viewer's eye more easily — while lighter colors allow for a broader, more expanded viewing experience. 

One trick is to utilize monochromatic or neutral colorways instead of contrasting colors. The more you break up a room through color, the smaller it will feel. Experienced home stagers will stick with monochromatic color schemes to blend space together for a "larger than life" feel. You’ll also want to stray away from bold colors or patterns on large furniture or walls, but they can be great in smaller accent pieces like pillows. So don’t risk being remembered as the property with the orange wall. 

Now, we're not saying every corner of a room needs to have light colorways. Dark accents walls in darker neutrals, can be useful on walls you want to make appear receding, like the wall behind the headboard in a bedroom. If a room is very dark, with unattractive views, embracing the darkness with a deep “non-color” color like black, charcoal, chocolate or blue can turn a negative into coolness. 

2. Arranging the Right Furnishing

Let me share a little secret: You can provide home buyers with a floorplan, but when it comes to home sales, perception is reality. This means that if buyers walk through a space and feel that it’s cramped, confining, and without flow, then no matter what the floorplan says, they will remember your property as small (too small for the asking price) and move right along to bid on something that feels larger. 

In short,  size and placement of furniture are paramount for an effective home staging. Here are the basic guidelines:

• Empty rooms actually look smaller. It sounds counterintuitive, but furniture provides an instant and visual measuring tape and helps buyers tremendously in perceiving the scale of a room. For example: it is very hard for an untrained eye to guess what type of bed fits into a bedroom without seeing it in place. 

• Edit Furniture While furniture helps with the perception of space, too much of it will achieve the opposite effect. Remember less is always more in home staging. Select only a few larger pieces of furniture among your belongings. If you have several armchairs in the living room, select the best 2-4 ones and put the rest in storage. Seating with a lower profile helps broaden a space by offering a lowered horizon and make walls seem larger — thus making the room seem bigger.  Transparent tables are perfect for creating the illusion of space. Try out glass top tables to create a more spacious tone. 

• Furniture placement Zigzagging through furniture, whether  in person or online,  will make buyers lose the momentum of that first glance at a room and start to worry about whether or not their own furnishings will actually fit. So stand at the entryway to the room you are staging and figure out which furniture placement is best to show off the entire length and width of a room.  While it may make sense to have a sofa in the middle of the room to watch TV, when selling your home it breaks it up and makes it feel shorter. 

3. Show Off Floors 

On top of furniture placement, one of the best ways to make a room larger is showing off your flooring.  Avoid large patterned rugs that are visually cluttering and end up making a room look smaller. Use instead small neutral-colored rugs that help anchor the furniture without covering too much floor. What if you don’t have smaller, neutral rugs? Buy them. Small rugs are very inexpensive. 

4. Clear Up Windows 

Sticking with the theme of light, windows are your go-to source for natural lighting. Keep curtains open or remove them entirely to fill every nook and cranny of a room with as much natural lighting as possible. Add simple solid neutral panels to help frame your windows and exude a warm and finished look. 

The more your potential buyer can see — the bigger the property will look! 

5. Enhance Ceiling Height 

Getting the most out of the verticality of your rooms will do wonders for creating a spacious feel. We recommend hanging art pieces, paintings, or decor as high up as possible without compromising the overall flow — as this will make your space look more open. If you have any window treatments, bring them up to ceiling height as well, as this will also give your rooms an airy and extended feel. 

Another suggestion is to make sure your walls and ceiling are painted the same light coloring, as separate colorways tend to create the illusion of spatial limitations — whereas the same color will liberate an area and give it a more unrestricted feel. Same applies to crown molding and baseboards. Paint them the same color of the wall.

6. Declutter

Staging a home means telling a story. You're attempting to bring potential homebuyers into an unfamiliar space and make it feel like home. So, each room should have a clear purpose in how it fits with the rest of the home. Attempting to combine multiple elements into a single room can end up making the space feel cluttered and cramped. The same can be said for too many accessories, pictures, or accent pieces. Edit and remove all unnecessary art and select a few large pieces to streamline the look and feel of each room. 

This is especially true when selling a luxury property. While it may seem like there's room to squeeze in a dining area in the living room — it's not going to offer spaciousness during the staging process. Instead, opt for a more design-focused approach instead of functionality when it comes to giving each room a purpose. 

7. Reflective Surfaces Are a Must 

Adding reflective surfaces like mirrors can have a significant impact on the spaciousness of your staging project. 

This tried and true trick of creating space through reflections is a must for making rooms look more open during the staging process. A well-placed mirror can create the illusion of depth if it's angled correctly and has an open focal point. Obviously, putting a mirror up that reflects a corner of a room isn't going to help, but if it's placed in the right spot — it can help bring an entirely new dimension to a room. 

Mirrors reflect natural and artificial light, making a room seem brighter both day and night. These reflections will also divert light deep into your rooms, giving them even more depth and spaciousness. One trick is to place mirrors near windows to reflect more natural light. 

Bonus Tip! 

It can be challenging to look at a property you have decorated and lived in for some time, and do it with a buyer’s critical viewpoint.  To assist in this process, my secret is to use photographs, not eyes, to gain that critical distance. 

So get out your phone and take pictures of each and every room, from the vantage point of the doorway.  Start with the main entryway to your property (the single most important view you capture), then do the same thing from the entryway to each ensuing room. 

Once you’ve done this, upload the pictures to your computer, and then sit back and take a look at each room’s photos in succession. You’ll be amazed at how different the rooms look on your computer screen. You’ll find it much easier to assess your rooms with detachment this way, as if the pictures are depicting a property that belongs to someone else, that you can view objectively with ease. From now on, those photos will be your ‘eyes’ and will therefore be some of your most important tools in getting your home ready to sell.

You can use this tool before and after the staging to make sure the property is photoshoot ready.