SOUTH BAY DIGS | Digital Edition Online

148 ARCHITECT | DESIGN | BUILD 12.19.2014 If you're addicted to HGTV like we are, you've probably seen "home stager to the stars" Meridith Baer on the show, "Selling ," and on the network's documentary series, "Staged to Perfection." Baer is the namesake behind her company, Meridith Baer Home, the largest home staging company in the country. Based in Los Angeles, Baer also stages luxury properties in New York City and the Hamptons, Miami and coastal Florida and Connecticut. She and her team also furnish homes in the beach cities and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Read on to learn how her career as a Hollywood screenwriter led to home staging, and find out which Hollywood celebrity homes have gotten the red carpet treatment from the pioneer of home staging. DRYAD HOUSE SOUTH BAY DIGS: I hear you have a colorful background. MERIDITH BAER: I was born in Los Angeles but weeks later moved to Northern California. My father was associate warden at San Quentin Prison and we lived on the prison grounds. I attended a one-room schoolhouse from 1st through 8th grades. Usually I was the only person in my grade, so I was both the valedictorian and the class dunce! SBD: Do you think living on prison grounds affected your knack for beautifying interiors? MB: The drabness of the prison reservation perhaps inspired me to be creative. From a young age my mom let me move the furniture around the house and gave me my own plot of land for my private garden. When I turned 13, my father became the director of Corrections for the state of Iowa and we moved to Des Moines. My mom was an early home flipper, and we moved from style-to-style large homes—English Tudor to Colonial to Modern. Through all of this my mom seemed to like my furnishing ideas and took notice when I suggested which furniture to buy. I still have some of those pieces in our staging inventory! SBD: I'm told your staging career was preceded by a stint as a writer. MB: In Des Moines I attended a large school that used a "tracking system." They called it 1-2-3-4, but it meant dumb, average, smart and talented. Even though the San Quentin school gave me straight A's, this school put me in the dumb class and I proceeded to do poorly in it. One day my teacher was out sick, and the teacher from the talented class covered for her and [gave us a writing assignment]. When he read my essay, he transferred me to the talented class and I began getting straight A's. All of this taught me to not just follow a single path but to be unafraid to take a new road. At the University of Colorado I got a journalism degree. While in college, I also flipped houses; I wasn't doing construction, just paint and gardening and styling. SBD: How did the Hollywood connection begin? MB: The week before graduation I was approached to be in a Pepsi commercial by a total stranger, a young New York City advertising man named Jerry Bruckheimer, now the most successful movie producer in the business. Doing the Pepsi commercials led me to New York, where I was hired to be an assistant to the editor of a magazine. Soon I was being asked to appear in print and television commercials—over 100—and then a movie. I did freelance writing, including writing "Passionate Shopper" pieces for New York Magazine. Later I moved to Los Angeles and continued to be in commercials, print ads and movies. I also did freelance magazine writing but the money was in the acting, not the writing. Through all of this, my hobbies were gardening and fixing up my various apartments and those of my friends. While reading movie scripts, many of which were poorly written, I thought, 'I can do this,' and wrote my first screenplay. I sold it for $250,000. SBD: Impressive! MB: After years earning a respectable living as a writer, I found myself tired of writing. I was about to turn 50 and the jobs were harder and harder to come by. At this point I was renting a home in Brentwood and found myself spending most of my time gardening. I acquired over 150 pots and filled them with trees, flowers and bushes,

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