Words by Johanna Harlow
Ahome staged by Coco Silver is a tastefully transformed space—but the process of gussying up a house before selling it is far from glamorous. “This is a tough business,” shares the owner of Coco Home. “It’s not about pretty sofas.”
With a stylish yet sensible aesthetic, Coco pairs her practical overalls with a sharp blazer and bold frames. She’s currently at her base of operations: a warehouse lined with Costco-sized racks, each one brimming with furniture, rugs, mattresses and enough art and photography prints to fill a gallery or two. As she moves among the rows, Coco explains that preparing homes for potential buyers involves a lot of “schlepping and packing and unpacking” as well as constant refurbishing and serious strategizing—and that’s before arriving on site.
Cover Photo and Above Photo: Courtesy of Ashley Maxwell Photography
“Sometimes when you get there, it works flawlessly—most of the time. And then other times you’re like, ‘This is a hot mess. Nothing is working,’” observes Coco. “The house has to speak to the pieces you bring in. And if it doesn’t, it vomits them out. And you’re like, ‘Nope, it does not want to be here.’” Fortunately, with a decade and a half of experience under her belt, this is a rare occurrence for the Mountain View resident. She also has lead designer Bre Heagney and a strong team backing her. “I can do it in my sleep now,” she affirms.
The main ingredient to making the staging process look effortless? It’s all in the prep work. “When we walk through a house, we’re like, ‘Okay, where’s the baby going? Is this going to be multi-generational and the grandparents are going to be here? Where’s Thanksgiving happening?’” She adds, “We even name the rooms.”
Photo: Courtesy of Evoke Media
Coco and her team take stock of what they have currently available in the warehouse, then delegate items across a number of projects—all while making each and every home look like a cohesive whole. Like a chess player, Coco must think several steps ahead. Except the pieces she’s moving are coffee tables and couches. “You constantly have to pivot,” she notes.
But for Coco, it’s in her blood. “My mom was Pinterest before Pinterest—always changing furniture and building couches out of cement blocks,” Coco recalls fondly. “We’d wake up to a whole new living room.”
Don’t get the wrong idea. Staging and interior design are “two completely different animals,” Coco observes. “Interior design is permanent. It’s lifestyle. How are your kids going to wear and tear this piece of furniture? Do you have dogs? Is it comfortable?” On the other hand, “Staging is an illusion. It is setting a set. It’s a prop house. We look at all the angles, at where the shot’s going to be and how it’s going to photograph, the size and scale of furniture.”
Photo: Courtesy of Evoke Media
Though she sources everything wholesale these days, in the scrappy early days of her business, Coco incorporated items from thrift and antique stores as well as pieces from her own home. “I’d have the box of my favorites,” she says. Like the print of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring given to her by her mother. “When I first started staging, that went into all of my houses.” Once in a while, it still makes a comeback.
Coco moves away from the main part of the warehouse to a side room with all kinds of treasures. Sculptures and serving trays, impressive bottles of whisky and gin, a pair of gilded antlers and endless other homey knickknacks ensure that no coffee table or bookshelf in one of Coco’s homes goes naked. There’s an abundance of wicker baskets and ottomans. Heaps of throw blankets and pillows (fluffy, patterned and tasseled). A bounty of books organized in color-coded stacks with inviting titles like The Time-Traveling Fashionista, The Diary of Frida Kahlo, Bad Girls Throughout History and How to Boil an Egg.
“I think my home looks very much like a Coco home project,” muses the staging designer, who says she gravitates toward an open look with neutral colors and a minimal approach.
Photo: Courtesy of Evoke Media
Coco also appreciates versatile items that work well across a variety of homes. “It’s such a curated eye,” she remarks of the designing process, explaining that there’s an art to weaving things into a cohesive whole. If you don’t have that knack, you’ll end up instead with a “big pile of home goods.”
Among Coco’s other talents is hospitality. In collaboration with singer and friend James Lanman, she hosted a popup holiday party last year at her warehouse, using her staging stash to deck out the industrial space. It had this “vibey kind of New York minute feeling,” she describes. “It was very speakeasy.” Guests savored pisco sours and Peruvian bites in the lobby-turned-lounge, then were ushered into the main warehouse for an intimate concert. As the audience settled into Coco’s eclectic inventory of couches and chairs, wrapping themselves in throw blankets, James and his five-piece band took the stage, performing jazzy holiday songs under the stringlights. “It broke my heart to take it down,” Coco says, adding that before they did, she used the setup as a backdrop for a couple of photo shoots as well as a sleepover with her kids.
Photo: Courtesy of Evoke Media
That isn’t the last time Coco has utilized the space to build connections. She’s also opened up her warehouse to host a real estate panel to shine a light on exemplary vendors in the industry, and plans for another popup with James are in the works. “When you come into someone’s home, it’s such a personal moment,” Coco muses. “To bring people to our house is so rad.”
Whatever the future holds, there’s a storehouse of possibilities waiting for Coco. Wherever she goes, she’ll be right at home.