Bee for Brian's Profile

I have a window over the kitchen sink. Better than TV.

Also, as for the "Confidence is crucial" advice, it would be pointless, transparent, and annoying to express random confidence with phrases like "A real charmer!" and "Won't last long!" Far better to spend those words making sure your customer knows the specific attributes of this house that the competing houses don't have. That's supported confidence, springing from actual knowledge of why the house is desirable. My partner and I recently sold a modest home (asking price was $118,000) in a market with lots of similar houses to choose from, so we knew to point out that (in our relatively flat terrain) this house is on the top of a hill and the back deck has a rare amount of "view" for our town, even though it was a cheap house. That kind of thing is not always immediately evident in listings -- get the distinguishing details into the buyer's mind early.

These tips are fine, but the unstated underlying principle of staging is: Declutter and depersonalize. I am amazed at how many homes show up in the MLS with photos that seem designed to emphasize the personal lives of the current owners. Store all your mementoes; coffee tables with bare surfaces are not distracting. Take down the 20 framed photos on your "feature wall," spackle the nail holes and repaint. It's not too early to remove the giant decal announcing that the second bedroom belongs to "K A Y L E E" or "J A S O N."

It's just shocking how often the real estate agent will take photos that show the furnishings instead of the house. When my partner and I were shopping, we had a running gag about MLS photos where the only response could be "That's a great bed! Look at all the pillows! And from the looks of it, I'd say that this bedroom includes a WALL!"

If you're sticking with neutrals, it doesn't matter that there's no ceiling line. Just use one color for walls and ceilling. If the white is too stark for you, go with cream. And disregard the advice about creating a ceiling line with molding! The curved ceiling is a feature, not a bug; don't create a problem by "solving" a charming bit of architectural interest.

The "AWFUL" brown carpet looks fine as a warm and grounding tone for your palette. The "espresso" tone of your list is the most personable color (unless you were planning to go overboard in ladling out the gold and silver), and it's hard to argue that brown clashes with espresso. Once you get your furnishings in there, all these supposedly hideous colors will retreat, and the focus will be on your belongings. Hope none of them are "AWFUL."

One other tip: The apartment will never be a grown-up apartment as long as you keep calling it "a grown-up apartment."

I second the motion to get yourself a vintage shaker. I have a beautiful etched-glass shaker with a silverplate top that cost $25 or so at a vintage store. It's far more watertight than my two (now discarded) modern shakers that led me to go shopping for it, and it's well designed: Multiple rings of glass at the base provide a "washboard effect" inside for muddling and provide a great grip on the outside.

The shakers shown here are gracelessly unattractive. They suggest a problem that doesn't really exist (if you really don't have room for a bartending guide but still need to consult recipes, there are plenty of free bartending apps for your phone; no extra space required, and thousands more recipes than on these shakers). And they solve the "problem" in a klunky way: There's room for only a few drinks, and what if you don't like Kamikazes or Sex On The Beach? Or what if the printed recipes don't match the proportions you like? And if you are making those same six drinks over and over, you'd memorize the ingredients anyway. These shakers will make you look like an amateur who doesn't want to explore beyond the standard cocktails and who doesn't appreciate the elegance that cocktails can evoke. Let's not encourage these clumsily styled products.

For 99% of people, #8 would have to count as "a creative use of type" if it's one of those applications whose perspective works from only one vantage point.

Language is for communicating. In a home, where you are not required to post "EXIT" signs for strangers, I can't think of a message that needs to be communicated 24 hours a day (especially "AWKWARD").

These bright and sculptural pots are shown in their best use -- with sculptural-looking plants of muted color. Putting this style of plant in plain pots might not provide enough interest to make it worth doing. But flowering or colorful or lacy plants would compete with these chunky, assertive pots.

Solo cup + ironic. Someone's aiming directly at hipsters. Hipsters, however, are likely to resist being treated like knee-jerk consumerists who are expected to be flattered by mass-market pandering, and the real market for these will be suburban moms who think the idea is cute.

People have been successfully drinking beverages for years without the benefit of these cups. What improvement do they offer? None, except for novelty. The only value here is the timely recognition that this is the moment when the red Solo cup is starting to be treated as a classic cultural icon. I'm surprised we haven't seen a nostalgic homage to the once-ubiquitous Dixie/Sweetheart cup (http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/3285). I think of that design as being eternal, but I see that it's remarkably hard to find visual references to it on Google.

My favorite thing is the atomic-era-looking chair next to the (also superb) demijohn lamp. Coincidentally, that chair is literally the only thing in the entire home that has any pattern. (Are the three big art pieces over the sofa really blank, or just too fine to register in these photos? Their apparent blankness reinforces the idea that this habitat clamps down hard to keep color and pattern under control.)

The orange credenza and the pink chair are fun and unexpected -- yet they are unexpected in such an expected way. It's like the designer was following a formula that says "6% of the furniture should be unpredictably unrelated to the rest of the look."

That said, I empathize with the idea that there's some happiness to be pursued via the dream of presenting a perfectly curated, spotless, coordinated, every-hair-in-place apartment to the public gaze. Now that that artificial illusion has been achieved, I hope this apartment can let its hair down a little. It looks like a wonderful place to have a drink, once you stop wondering whether Hendricks is really the chicest choice and whether your cocktail napkin is annoying the tablescape.

The untidy and unnecessary swag, the irregular cord, the industrial color, the glare -- every detail of this fixture evokes a warehouse. I'm trying to understand why that's desirable. Maybe the homeowner strongly dislikes anything that is fakely elegant, twee, or tainted with some false idea of style (and there are a lot of fixtures out there that try too hard to be "stylish" or "fancy"). But this isn't just clean or simple or neutral; this is actively industrial and brutal.

Maybe it's an urban thing. I suppose that if you see these fixtures hanging around in enough lofts that have been converted from industry to residential use, you might start to equate "industrial-looking lamp" with "creative vision for imagining a new use of space." But there's a difference between retaining pre-existing crude lighting and choosing to install it.