UK Style - House Doctor

...point of view) to the UK around 7 years ago, having previously worked at staging homes in the USA. Ann’s TV fame came about almost by accident. Whilst on holiday in Italy she met an English woman who was intrigued by Ann’s ‘unusual’ career. By a quirk of fate the woman’s daughter worked for BBC's Home Front who got wind of the idea. Ann’s first TV appearance was staging a home for Home Front. The rest is history.

The ‘House Doctor’ ...
...believe that her ideas make a lot of sense and that anyone thinking of selling their house would do well to catch some of the old re-runs of ‘House Doctor’ which are shown regularly on UK Style.





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Would you let a complete stranger into your home to criticise your wallpaper, shake her head at your cluttered shelves, and give you a good ticking off about all those unfinished DIY projects? Apparently dozens of people have already done that, if the ‘House Doctor’ programme is anything to go by. With a recent new series on Channel 5, I thought it would be a good time to review this programme, which may sound like another ‘home makeover’ show but is actually quite compulsive viewing.

As Channel 5's ‘House Doctor’, former Californian estate agent and interior designer Ann Maurice has rapidly gained a huge cult following in the UK. Fans regularly tune in to the half hour shows to watch her quickly transform Britain's unsaleable properties into houses that everyone wants to buy. The House Doctor programme is currently in its fifth series and is as popular as ever. For me personally, the appeal of ‘House Doctor’ is that it shows that loads of other people are just as lazy, slovenly and clutter ridden as I am!!

Ann Maurice hails from San Francisco and introduced the concept of ‘Home Staging’ (how to prepare your home for sale from both a practical and aesthetic point of view) to the UK around 7 years ago, having previously worked at staging homes in the USA. Ann’s TV fame came about almost by accident. Whilst on holiday in Italy she met an English woman who was intrigued by Ann’s ‘unusual’ career. By a quirk of fate the woman’s daughter worked for BBC's Home Front who got wind of the idea. Ann’s first TV appearance was staging a home for Home Front. The rest is history.

The ‘House Doctor’ programme is built around a fairly simple concept, although as I will go on to show, the format of the show has evolved somewhat since the first series. Basically, the producers concentrate on finding a house in a fairly desirable area which has been on the market for a long time, usually more than six months. Cue interview with the estate agent handling the property to prove that this is not a set up. The estate agent may give examples of other similar houses in the same area which have sold well in recent times and whether or not they feel the house is realistically priced. Sometimes the estate agent may give their opinion on what they think is wrong with the house (needs some decorating, etc.) but mostly they usually express genuine surprise that the house isn’t selling. Often the house is fairly desirable, i.e. large rooms, old cottage in picturesque village, etc. From the outside it seems amazing that the house hasn’t been snapped up long ago.

Once you see inside the house you begin to see why it maybe isn’t the ideal for many buyers. A video is shown of prospective purchasers looking around. The videos are heavily edited to pick up on all the bad points of the house and the viewers’ reactions and comments to them, so lots of shots of cracked light switches or sockets, dirty baths, frayed carpets, cluttered rooms, pet beds, greasy cookers, cheesy ornaments, and my personal favourite - loud tasteless wallpaper.

Ann then turns up in person to meet the current owners, see round the house and make her criticisms. Right from the start she doesn’t pull any punches in saying what she thinks is wrong and what needs to be done to the house. But she does so in a surprisingly tactful way. She seems to appreciate that people take criticism of their home environment very personally, and she is extremely good at breaking down resistance to her ideas by the use of good, reasoned argument. As part of the meeting the owners usually sit down with Ann, the presenter and the owners to view more of the video footage shown earlier. After seeing the negative comments made by prospective purchasers, most people are usually convinced (albeit reluctantly) that they need Ann’s expertise to help them sell their property.

What surprises me about the programme is that most of the owners usually have a hard time accepting Ann’s very practical and no-nonsense ideas. Generally the owners have a fairly pressing reason for needing to sell their house. Typical examples include a family emigrating to Australia, a couple desperate for more space with a new baby on the way, couples needing to sell a property as a result of a relationship breakdown or divorce and older people needing to downsize after the kids have left home. You would think that these things would make them very eager to buy into Ann’s ideas, particularly as she has over 23 years experience of selling houses and a degree in interior design. Given that the programme is into a fifth series, the concept of ‘home staging’ is hardly a new one and the owners must obviously have seen the show before and have an idea of Ann’s success rate. Unfortunately most of the owners generally hate what is happening to their house and only a handful of shows have featured people ‘mucking in’ willingly to assist with the de-cluttering, cleaning and painting. Unusually, one guy did completely totally commit to the idea and built a fireplace, re-roofed and extension and laid a new carpet in the week Ann was there. There was even a suggestion that he took Ann for a ride on his motorbike! Ann was so surprised she made him an honorary member of the ‘House Doctor’ team.

What Ann Maurice sets out to demonstrate is that however you live your life most of the time, when selling your house you have to adopt a completely different strategy. For the most part her suggestions are mainly common sense. First of all she advises cleaning, especially kitchens and bathrooms. There is no greater turn-off to a prospective purchaser than grimy worktops, scale around the bath and an unhygienic loo. What the programme illustrates is how little effort some people make when selling their house. I have been amazed that people would consider putting their house on the market and not even bothering to tidy away their children’s toys or even do the washing up! There seems to be a general belief by owners that prospective buyers will look beyond the dirt and clutter and the house will sell itself. As Ann so aptly demonstrates, the reality is often very different. An excess of dirt and personal possessions can actually act as a distraction, masking the more attractive features of the house and making prospective buyers believe that they will have to spend a great deal of money to make the house the sort of place that they would want to live in.

To this end, as well as cleaning Ann recommends removing unnecessary clutter, and advises dividing clutter into piles for throwing away, giving away to charity, selling (one couple had a garage sale) and putting into storage for retrieval after the house has sold. Removing clutter makes room appear bigger, and allows people to walk around the room, see out of windows and actually SEE the rooms and appreciate their features.

Ann also recommends de-personalising rooms. This might mean removing those wedding photos and that collection of 144 teapots and also changing the colour of walls, moving away from bold, vibrant colours that reflect the owner’s own taste and personality, and using more neutral colours such as yellows, soft greens and magnolia. This is the part of house doctoring that most owners find most hard to deal with. But Ann’s method is actually fairly logical. Her reasoning is that the present owners shouldn’t be upset at what is happening to the house if the result is that they make a sale. As she has pointed out several times, when selling your house you should mentally have ‘moved out’ several weeks before the sale, allowing you to remove unnecessary personal possessions and to make cosmetic changes to the house which may not necessarily reflect you own taste or style, but which allow prospective purchasers to envision themselves living in the house. It’s impossible to do this if a house is filled to the brim with stuff the owners have acquired or collected over the years and it also makes the house look extremely small.

Once the house is cleared of clutter, Ann organises redecoration where required, bringing in professionals to do what the owners can’t manage themselves, hiding ugly features and attending to those DIY jobs which have never been finished. Mostly her staged homes will feature very neutral wall colours and carpets in the public rooms, although where original wooden floors or parquet are revealed when carpets are lifted, Ann tries where possible to sand down, stain and re-varnish these as she considers them a selling point and it is much cheaper than buying a new carpet. Her favourite colours for kitchens and bedrooms are light greens and yellows. Her aim is always for a clean fresh look, to make rooms look light and airy and above all much bigger.

Ann also recommends that people have a think about pets if they have them, as some prospective purchasers find ‘doggy odour’ around the house to be offensive, dislike hamster or bird cages in bedrooms, make negative remarks about find dog beds or litter trays lying around everywhere and find uneaten cat food on the kitchen floor to be a turnoff. Most people will also consider a large cage of ferrets outside the kitchen window to be positively repellent. All these things have happened during the ‘House Doctor’ series! Ann is actually a dog owner herself, so instead of banishing pets altogether she tries to find alternatives. So Ann will maybe recommend hiding away feed or litter trays, washing the dog, cleaning carpets or furniture to remove hair and smells and not letting pets climb on furniture whilst people are looking around. If the pets are fairly boisterous it is sometimes possible to get friends or relatives to look after them during the viewing period. She realises what many home owners do not, that not all prospective purchasers are pet lovers.

Ann will also go through the house picking out furniture and ornaments which bring out the best in the property. Where necessary she will recommend a shopping trip to purchase new bed linen, towels, cushions, curtains and light fittings, but these are usually purchased at sales, markets or reasonably priced outlets such as IKEA. Another favourite is to place mirrors in strategic points to lighten dark hallways or make rooms appear bigger. Several shows have featured the use of furniture borrowed from friends or relatives, or rented for the period the house is on the market. This is very useful if the current sofa is looking tired and the owners don’t want to spend thousands buying another. Some items are obtained from material previously placed in storage by the owners or even items thrown out by other people which are painted, recovered or somehow given a new lease of life.

Once the transformation of the house is complete Ann shows the presenter around the finished rooms and a video is then shown of prospective purchasers seeing around the house again. Almost without exception the comments are almost always positive, whatever the viewers thought of the house before they are almost always impressed. Ann then takes her leave. Although generally the owners dislike the mess and disruption of the makeover, which can last from a week a ten days on average, many become very friendly with Ann and by the end of the programme are impressed with the house and have ‘bought into’ her ideas. Sometimes Ann is presented with a parting gift such as flowers or a bottle of wine. Usually the programme ends with an update on the sale process. Almost without exception the houses generally sell very quickly, sometimes in just a few days, sometimes it takes a few weeks or more.

Basically Ann turns on its head the general attitude of most house buyers which is "I am going to sell it. Not worth spending money on it". She demonstrates that spending money on a property you are about to leave makes sense, not only from the point of view of a sale, but the point of view of a profit. Money spent on furniture or furnishings is never wasted because Ann is always carefully to align with owner’s current tastes involving them in the shopping process so that they can take many of their purchases with them to their new home. With house prices increasing rapidly during the run of the show, recent programmes have demonstrated that the return on investment can be enormous. A large house in London where Ann spent £3,000 sold for over £15,000 above the asking price. And that was several years ago.

I mentioned earlier that I would give an example of how the ‘House Doctor’ show has changed over the years because I’m not convinced that anyone else has ever tried to do this. In the first series, which was hosted by William Van Hage, the emphasis was more on tidying up properties and very little cosmetic changes were made. This was mainly because of money constraints. The properties were seldom worth more than about £45,000 so Ann rarely spent more than a few hundred pounds. This obviously limited the extent to which she could replace carpets etc. as happened in later series. Where plumbers or electricians were required Ann generally engaged local tradesmen. I don’t really like the first series very much although it’s fascinating to see how much Ann achieves on a very small budget. William Van Hage was not a very good presenter and I personally never warmed to him. He makes much of the ‘new Californian House Doctor’ idea because at the time it wasn’t much known about and many of the owners had never really heard of professional home stagers before. A lot of time was also wasted in the early series showing the same videos of prospective purchasers over and over again, so there wasn’t much time for to observe the actual makeover process.

One aspect of the first series which I find very daft is that when the prospective purchasers were invited back, it was usually a new set of people, so it was impossible for them to make comparisons with what the house looked like before. Later on the producers made a real effort to get back the same people who had been filmed viewing the house previously, so they could comment on the changes Ann had made. This made for better television, because often people who had hated the house on the first viewing were then tempted to make an offer.

Series two was better, because they bought in Tris Payne as a presenter. He had a lot more personality, which meant the programme flowed better. The owners had a better idea of what the show was about and there was a lot less explanation of the home staging process. It was also about series two or three that they formed the ‘House Doctor Team’, which was basically a team of people in green t-shirts who travelled round with Ann doing most of the decorating and other DIY jobs. I think the producers hoped in the early days that the owners would do more of the work and this didn’t always happen, also it is possible that as the makeovers became more complicated using local tradesmen got to be uneconomic.

As house prices increased, so Ann had more of a budget, so the makeovers became more complicated and the programmes more interesting. Rather than spending a few hundred pounds, Ann now had the scope to spend £500-£1,000, (and in the London area it was often much more) based on the premise of trying to spend no more than 1 percent of the value of the house. This gave her the scope to do things like replacing carpets, laying wooden flooring and replacing kitchen cupboard doors. One property had an empty room which the owners were planning to turn into an ensuite bathroom. Because all the fixtures and fittings had already been purchased, Ann was able to bring in a plumber to finish the job for about £300. The extra bathroom probably added thousands to the value of the house. Suddenly the shows weren't just about tidying up the kitchen and putting mirrors in the hallway anymore.

Tris Payne didn’t last, and currently the presenter is Alistair Appleton. A presenter on other home makeover shows, Alistair has great personality, is very enthusiastic and also has a great rapport with Ann, with a lot of banter and innuendo going on between them which makes the programmes quite funny. The owners warm to him, and although he doesn’t have much of an involvement in the actual transformation, he injects a bit of zap and helps things to move along quite rapidly, with the result that Ann can usually win over the owners and get started on the actual makeover process well before the commercial break. This is great, because you then get to see more of what is being done to the house. Recent ‘House Doctor’ programmes have featured Alistair visiting Ann’s own homes in California and Mexico, where you get to see some of her own ideas on interior design, and to see the end result of what have been some fairly major DIY projects.

If I have one criticism of this show, it would be that it struggles to contain itself within the half hour format. I think this programme could easily stretch to an hour, with the inevitable commercial breaks that would only add about another 15 minutes anyway. I think a lot of people share my view that it is great to see the before and after shots of the rooms, but I would like to see more of the actual work that went into the transformation, and there isn’t always enough time to see this.

Ann has now become so popular that she has written several books and even hosts ‘home staging seminars’ and workshops on how to de-clutter you life. I realise that not everyone enjoys her shows and her philosophy remains alien to some, but I do believe that her ideas make a lot of sense and that anyone thinking of selling their house would do well to catch some of the old re-runs of ‘House Doctor’ which are shown regularly on UK Style.

 

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