How a stager brightened and decluttered a small Liberty Village condo

Address: 100 Western Battery Road Listed for: $418,000 Sold for: $412,000

The property

This 755-square-foot Liberty Village condo is part of a three-building development near King and Strachan. The seller and his fiancée, both 30-somethings with white-collar jobs, were looking to upsize, and wanted to move this property ASAP. When the unit went on sale last year, the market wasn’t quite as blazing hot as it is right now, and the place didn’t go over asking. Even so, it was snapped up within two days.

The stager

Dayna Kenney started staging professionally three years ago, after 10 years in marketing. Her company, Taylor Kenney, is a team of three that works all over the GTA. “I get inspired by even small pieces of furniture,” she says. “I fall in love with that piece and the design evolves from there.”

The strategy

The two biggest issues, Kenney says, were the condo’s bowling-lane layout and the lack of cohesion between its rooms. Her team did its best to adapt to the former, and they solved the latter by crafting a consistent look using furniture and accessories—and also by painting the entire condo (which initially had two dark-coloured feature walls) with a fresh, uniform coat of white.

Kenney turned the living room into a dining space. “The couch was right beside the fridge,” she says. “We wanted to make it feel like a kitchen.” She brought in a small circular table and some lighter, less bulky chairs. She got the lamp from Union Lighting, and bought the gold-dipped bulb at HomeSense. The final touch: throwing up the blinds to show off the view and let some light in.

She brought in a sleeker, “condo-sized” couch to replace the previous one, and added a coffee table and area rug to define the living space and add some warmth. Then she replaced an art piece with a mirror, to reflect light pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and switched out the heavy clock (“It didn’t even work,” Kenney says) for a small print. Some new couch pillows, selected from West Elm and Homesense, added colour.

The dark headboard and side tables are balanced out with pops of lighter colours in the bedding. The framed art piece above the bed came courtesy of Toronto-based photographer James Brylowski.

Kenney left this room largely untouched. The seller, a music lover, didn’t want his guitars stored—which was fine, because the goal was to sell to a younger buyer, anyway. A little bit of cleaning and decluttering, and a fresh coat of paint, improved the look of the space. Kenney added a floor lamp beside the futon, to match the table lamp.