Using Cookbooks for Home Staging?

food-network-dr1

You would be hard pressed to not find a cookbook or two or thirty in a household...why not use them as props to stage your home to sell?  As I mentioned in my last post about staging bookcases, you want to use hardcover cookbooks.  Paperbacks just don't display as well and are not able to stand up as needed.  There are a lot of creative things you can do with cookbooks.  Here's an example of a model home that I designed with a Food Network dining room/kitchen theme.  I used 6 cookbooks from well-known chefs from the Food Network like Rachael Ray, Ina Garten, Paula Deen, Giada De Laurentiis, Emeril Lagasse, as well as a Food Network Favorites book.  We installed two inexpensive picture ledges from IKEA so that we could display the cookbooks on the wall and basically used them as art.  We would have otherwise  hung a piece of framed artwork or a mirror in this space.  Why not do something similar with what you have in your cookbook library?

italian-kitchen

closed-cookbook2

 Other more typical things you can do is display a cookbook propped on a book rack near the stove or on the center island.  You can either display the cookbook closed so the cover shows or open it to a specific recipe.   Click on the photo to enlarge the image. In my next post, I will show you how you can create a theme around the cookbook that you use and carry that throughout with the props used in staging your kitchen.  It's a lot of fun and really creates a more interesting environment for buyers to see.