Staged Long Island born after Lucille DeFina improves the look of a Florida rental home

About a decade ago, Lucille DeFina inadvertently forayed into a second career — staging homes.

Seeking renters for a South Florida vacation property that she and her husband owned, the Merrick resident said she had improved the look of the home’s interiors, including removing dark draperies and replacing outdated furniture with modern pieces.

"Although the place was on the Intracoastal, it wasn’t fancy, and it was important to make it look really desirable," said DeFina, who is in her 60s.

Staging involves making living spaces look spacious and attractive to buyers or renters, as compared to interior decorating, which focuses on creating spaces that reflect owners’ personal needs and tastes, DeFina said.

Thanks to her staging efforts, she rented out the Florida house every week and received referrals for staging gigs from the property’s management company.

In 2016, DeFina launched Staged Long Island.

Headquartered in the DeFinas’ home, the business consists of DeFina and her husband, who retired from television production in 2010 and handles tasks like moving furniture and hanging décor.

For DeFina, who attended the Fashion Institute of New York, staging properties — both brand new and occupied — merges her passion for real estate with her design sensibility. In her previous career, she was an executive at private-label clothing companies, where her work, targeted to discount stores such as Walmart, encompassed copying high-end dresses with inexpensive materials. She left the garment industry in the 1990s.

"Once I realized staging is like fashion, I could look at an Architectural Digest living room that costs $200,000 to furnish and knock off the same look for under $10,000 and, in some cases, under $5,000, and make a home look very trendy and high-end, even though it wasn’t," said DeFina. Since 2016, she has been an accredited staging professional.

DeFina recently spoke to Newsday about her home-staging business. Answers have been edited for space.

What are your design goals for staged properties?

Whether new or occupied, properties should be light, well-maintained and with a newness and spaciousness. I want people to feel wowed.

No can openers or microwaves on the kitchen counter because they do nothing for the space, and no personal stuff because people get distracted by personal pictures and other décor.

Does your firm remove the furniture and other items?

No. But if homeowners don’t have someone to store and pack their furnishings, I recommend people.

How many staging gigs do you handle a year?

On average 20, split between occupied homes and new builds.

I turn a lot of business away, because I give a lot of attention to the ones I take on.

What’s one of the questions you ask a prospective client?

Who is hiring me — the broker or the property owner? The person calling me believes the place needs work so I need to know who I’m working for since it’s teamwork.

What’s one of the questions homeowners ask you?

They want to know whether staging is going to help the sale price, and the answer depends on the asking price and location. But if the house is falling apart, they’ll have to do some basics themselves before I do any staging.

They’ll need good floors and a light, neutral wall paint for a good backdrop.

Do you own or rent the furnishings you provide?

I rent the big furniture — sofas, dining room tables. Everything else we already own, including chairs, pillows, rugs, fake flowers, cookbooks and lamps.

Where do you store all your stuff?

We have a 2½-car garage that my husband has transformed into storage space, and most of my linens, pillows and artwork are stored in our home’s attic.

What do you charge?

I give a flat rate, which includes the amount of time to stage a home, usually 1½ to 2 days, and the furnishings I bring to the job.

The average fee is $4,200.

But the smallest, between $1,800 to $2,200, would be an occupied home using the homeowner’s stuff. There’d be nothing to rent or carloads of items for us to bring to the house, so the labor is less intense. I’d give the homeowners an instructional guide, which is my written report of how each room should look after staging, but the homeowners need to do the work themselves. I’d also provide three to four consultation visits.

The most expensive, about five years ago, was $18,000 in the Hamptons. It was new construction, but with its open floor plan, people would have had trouble figuring out how to manage that kind of space.

It sold within a week of staging and opened the door to my Hamptons clients.

What rooms are staging priorities?

The living room, dining room and primary bedroom. But if you’re on a tight budget and the really small den needs attention, why waste money on staging the primary bedroom? You need to allocate money in the areas that need it.

The biggest challenges?

Price resistance. On Long Island, I’m expected to do a whole house for no more than $4,000, but in Manhattan, you can get $5,000 for a tiny one-bedroom.

Also, in an owner-occupied house, when you move furniture around, people think you don’t like their taste, and when you replace their paintings, they feel it’s not their house.

I have sympathy for them and apologize a lot.