Wanting to Share the "GREEN"... I'm Gonna Recycle a Full-Circle Moment in My Own Life

This past November I took a business trip to China. I traveled there because the professional designer side of "me" was required; however to my surprise the personal side of "me" was profoundly impacted.

It just so happens that when I was in China, I visited both Hong Kong and a city called on the mainland called Shenzhen (which is 45 minutes away from Hong Kong via water taxi). During this trip something became quite apparent to me… Hong Kong was all about consuming, and Shenzhen was all about manufacturing. Shimmering and sparkling, yet stuffed and cluttered in EVERY nook and cranny of the streets of Hong Kong, were stores, shops and boutiques offering for sale every conceivable thing we stuff into our lives.

Oddly, in contrast, was Shenzhen, a city where pollution constantly spewed out of the thousands and thousands of factories located there. The pollution was so bad that I could literally and easily look directly into the sun in the middle of the day. Sadly, at one point we drove over a river that was so polluted it was thick and black as tar. (I am NOT exaggerating.) It is also important to note that Shenzhen is just one of the multitude of manufacturing/industrial cites throughout the world that makes the material goods we think we "need" in our consumer society.

Upon returning to the states, I started to reflect on all I had experienced and thinking about how it affects my job as a home stager… and I came to a “full circle moment” in my life.
I came to realize that in this age of consumption, it’s kind of odd that my job as a stager is to "transition" a home back to simpler view. Basic to what we do is de-cluttering the mass amount of consumer "stuff" that has built up in a seller’s house. In fact, if a stager’s work is done properly, completely and timed right, the seller can actually PROFIT from the sale of their home. It is scary to think that these “profits” then COULD then be used to go out and buy more "stuff".

But now, because of this trip to 2 cities in China… if I have it my way, people that use our home staging services will begin to look at their lives and their desire for stuff in a new way. I hope and want to show people, whose homes we transform, that a beautiful home NEVER needs to be STUFFED full of useless consumer crap. I hope to share with all our clients the fundamental lesson EVERY interior designer is thought early on in their design education... the fact that "Less is More."

For now, because of my trip to 2 cities in China, I come to realize our planet's life truly depends on less being MORE.

Green It Forward...
Me