Samantha Atlas of Ash Staging: 5 Questions

Staging can play a critical role in residential real estate. It helps to bring a model unit to life, and it provides potential renters and buyers with a glimpse of what their future home could look like. 

Successfully staging requires more than a properly positioned couch and some art on the walls. Enter Ash Staging, a  luxury staging and model residence design business that has completed thousands of projects — including commercial and hospitality spaces — over the last 15 years, representing over $50 billion in real estate. 

Samantha Atlas, senior director of projects at Ash Staging, has been with the firm for nine years. She splits her time between Los Angeles and New York City, and helped to launch the company’s West Coast office.

Commercial Observer caught up with Atlas in mid-August to discuss her time with Ash Staging and the value of her work in real estate. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: What is the mission of Ash Staging?

Samantha Atlas: I’ve been with Ash for a little over nine years now, and really seen it grow. I run the L.A. office, and I joined the company at a time of growth. 

Since I joined, the story has been, “How do we continue to grow and change the narrative of what staging can be?” Generally speaking, for a long time the idea around staging has been neutrality — nothing with a serious point of view. 

I came to work at Ash because we sort of eschewed that. We want to imbue personality. We want our clients and our potential buyers of these homes to have an emotional response — it’s what drives us. We believe in the power of paint and will really push our clients to invest outside of the staging into the property to get it sold. 

What we really believe in, and how we position ourselves as a brand, is being a partner alongside our real estate agents, clients and developers.

What are some of the projects that Ash has staged?

We just finished staging the 100 Barclay penthouses. These are two gorgeous penthouses there on the East Coast. 

It’s funny because it is hard to talk about what we’ve done on the West Coast because it is so celebrity-driven. Although we did fairly recently do a refresh of our staging at the Penthouse East at 8899 Beverly, which recently sold as well. 

Back on the East Coast, we did the second penthouse of 111 Murray Street as well, which we’re really excited about. 

We are partners in the luxury market on both coasts, and our partners come to us for that sense of imbuing personality and character, particularly through vintage furniture — which is something that we invest in heavily.

How do you take a model unit from a blank canvas to a place people will want to live? Use 111 Murray Street as an example. 

Our clients come to us — particularly for that project — where the space is near construction completion, and we really say, “OK, listen, this is truly a beautiful white box.” And we look at how we can imbue personality into this space. Because, without personality, a lot of these spaces look the same. 

So with 111 Murray — a glass box in the sky — we wanted to ensure that there are different sensations that are happening throughout. In that space, we did a moody library office — that was a bit darker and cozier than the expansive, light and bright living room space. So a bit of restraint here and there throughout a larger home leaves memory in our buyer’s mind. 

Also, homeowners — especially in the luxury market — are first shopping for properties online. They are seeing home after home, room after room, white room after white room, that is sort of flipped one after another. So to have an image stand out to them is critical.

When you are staging a model unit, how do you make it feel like an authentic home, versus a sales pitch?

This is what we pride ourselves on and where we separate ourselves from the competition. It’s a fine line, and you don’t want to go too far with it because then there’s too much personality and you can’t see yourself living in it. 

Accessories are one way we really shine. We love to play, and we’ll do things like put a chessboard on the table. But, instead of just leaving it as a fresh chessboard, all the pieces are set in different spots, so it looks like it was left mid-game. 

If we are staging a kids room, we’ll do things like have some butcher paper on the wall that has some kids’ drawings on them that our designers can have some fun with. We’ll put out chalk and paint so it looks used and not super crisp. It will feel like someone just left the space. 

What is Room Service from Ash?

On-demand staging. We launched this initiative in the fall of last year, and we are really excited about it. It is a response to a change in the market and our clients’ needs, particularly in the development space.

It’s really aiming at taking our depth of knowledge from the hotel business side of Ash and our staging business, and combining the two, bringing together that joint knowledge. The idea is really to provide interior decorating and furnishing services for hospitality, commercial and residential spaces. 

This will focus on very fast interior decorating projects. We might have a client with a penthouse and they need it staged quicker than usual. This is a person or client who doesn’t want to wait a year, or even upward of three years sometimes, for an interior designer to finish their work. They want to be able to live in their property now, and that’s really where we come in. 

We have the breadth of knowledge of vendors that we work with from the staging business who can expedite furniture quickly for us to make a space really beautiful and livable, in the immediate. 

Then, on the commercial and hospitality side of things, a lot of our new development clients have oftentimes had disjointed projects in which they worked with multiple vendors and multiple designers for an amenity space, and then us for the models, and then someone else for the lobby. 

There’s all these different spaces, and with Room Service we can do all of that for you. We’re your one-stop shop. We can make sure that the amenities spaces speak to the lobby space, and to the models, so it all feels like one cohesive story.

Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.