How a stager refreshed a North York home’s interior without ever picking up a paintbrush

Address: Hove Street, near Bathurst and Sheppard Listed for: $1,395,000 Sold for: $1,950,700

The property

Hove Street is located in a suburban North York neighbourhood with a lot of empty-nesters, but some of them are starting to make way for young families. The sellers of this property, who fall into the former category, hired a stager to modernize their three-bedroom house, where the furnishings included several antique pieces passed down from their parents.

The stager

Red Barrinuevo got into staging professionally in 2011, after stints as an investment banker and a pharmaceutical sales rep. His company, Redesign4More, is based in the Church-Wellesley Village.

The strategy

Barrinuevo wanted to freshen up the interior by bringing in brighter, trendier, and less bulky furniture to replace the owners’ heavy, dark Tudor-style pieces. By adding reflective tables and removing drapes, he hoped to introduce some natural light.

The sellers didn’t want to repaint the interior. The yellow-mustard wall colour in the living room “was not ideal,” Barrineuvo says, but he made it work with similarly coloured cushions and table centrepieces. He left the drapes up in this room to cover excess wiring. (The reason the house is in such disarray in the “before” images, below, is that the sellers were hurriedly packing their belongings while those photos were being taken.)

“There was way too much going on in here,” Barrinuevo says. The dining room was being used both for entertaining and as a home office. The owners had even squeezed in a piano. Barrinuevo removed everything but the dining room table and chandelier. He added sleek, trendy chairs and a glass console table.

This room’s built-in shelving was an eyesore, so Barrineuvo did his best to shift the focus to the bed. He wasn’t crazy about the colour, though, so he added a headboard and some blue sheets and pillows. The circular mirrors with leather straps match the antler painting in the corner, giving the room a distinctive look.

In this bedroom, adding two small beds instead of a single larger one highlighted the fact that the house could, in theory, suit a family of five. Barrinuevo moved the owners’ living-room bookshelf in here to provide some visual separation.