Virtual home staging in Ballsbridge

Ballsbridge is Dublin 4 at its most expensive, and the stock runs from the largest houses in the country to some of its most ordinary apartments. Shrewsbury Road and Ailesbury Road are detached and semi-detached Victorian and Edwardian houses on deep gardens, priced in the millions and often embassies, ambassadors' residences or houses that have just stopped being one. Raglan Road, Elgin Road, Wellington Road and Clyde Road are tall Victorian terraces and villas, redbrick or stucco, with basements, granite steps and drawing rooms on the first floor, many long ago converted to flats and slowly returning to single houses. Around Herbert Park the redbricks are Edwardian and family-sized; towards Sandymount and the Merrion Road they are smaller. The apartments are their own market: 1960s and 70s blocks along Pembroke Road, Northumberland Road and Anglesea Road built for the diplomatic and corporate letting trade, with big rooms, small windows and dated kitchens, and at the other end Lansdowne Place on the old Berkeley Court site and Number One Ballsbridge, where two-beds start well over a million and the buyer is often trading down from an Ailesbury Road house. The photographs fail at both ends. A period drawing room with four-metre ceilings makes ordinary furniture look lost; an embassy-belt apartment is shot with the corporate letting furniture of 1995 still in it; a new apartment is photographed empty and reads as a show unit no one has moved into. Decluttering clears the letting furniture; staging then puts in pieces of the proportion those rooms demand, calm and low in the small-windowed blocks, full-scale in the villas, and leaves plasterwork, sashes and floors exactly as photographed.

Ballsbridge buyers are a narrow, well-funded group who often decide from a distance: senior executives relocating to the Meta and Google offices a short walk away at Fibonacci Square and Grand Canal Dock, returning emigrants buying the Dublin 4 house they always meant to come back to, diplomats and the landlords who let to them, and downsizers moving from a Shrewsbury Road garden to a Lansdowne Place penthouse without leaving the postcode. Many see the house first on Daft.ie or MyHome.ie from London, New York or Singapore, or through a relocation agent who screens fifty listings for five viewings. At this level the sale is still a bidding round, but a slower one: fewer buyers, bigger gaps between offers, and a house that photographs badly can sit for a season while the one next door goes over guide. Ex-rental stock is the particular problem here: embassy-belt apartments and terrace houses coming out of decades of corporate tenancies with furniture no buyer will keep, and period houses arriving as executors' sales after a lifetime in one family. A staged listing, drawing room furnished at scale and apartment decluttered back to its light, reads as a home rather than an inventory, and the property page lets an agent send the staged and original views together to a buyer who will decide the trip on them.