Will colour-coded bookshelves help sell my home?

A friend is selling her home and has employed a stylist to help present the property for viewing. To her horror, said stylist has arranged her extensive book collection in colour-coded order. Should my friend resist?
T.P., Balmain, NSW

Credit: Drew Aitken

Some home-sellers do this, don’t they? Hire a stylist to redecorate their home, refurnish their home, zhuzh up their home so it no longer looks like their home. It looks like an IKEA showroom with a SÖDERHAMN sofa and a MÖRBYLÅNGA table and a bunch of fake, empty-paged, colour-coded books lined up on a SKRUVBY bookcase.

And I guess some home-buyers fall for that, don’t they? They’ll pay good money to buy a bland, generic property that might once have been inhabited by The Sims. But not me, uh-uh. When I was house-hunting, I was always drawn to houses that had a lived-in vibe. Places with human smells and cluttered rooms and holes punched in the wallboard with the word “MOTHER” scrawled underneath – they just seemed more charming. And affordable. Ideally, your friend needs to find that perfect in-between level of styling – enough to make the house look roomy and tasteful without it being so vacant it looks as if it’s about to get blasted in a nuclear test.

That’s why colour-coding a book collection is going too far: it’s judging a book by its colour. Books are the soul of a house: they need to look used and dishevelled, like a wall in a secondhand bookshop (without the gouty old bookseller lurking around the corner). Tell your friend to
put her collection back in a randomly arranged order. Otherwise, home-buyers may find it jarring and lose interest in the place – and your friend may end up selling a house with a hole punched in the wallboard and the word “STYLIST” scrawled underneath.

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