This home came to us in estate condition, the kind of place most buyers write off as a gut renovation waiting to happen. After roughly $50,000 in staging, plus paint and repairs it was listed at $5,800,000. The apartment instantly started a bidding war, and it ultimately sold for $7,550,000, a full $1,750,000 over ask, in 32 days.

The apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park had been home to the Romanoff family for more than fifty years, and had never once come up for sale. By the time we walked in, the rarest Russian and Italian antiques were already gone.

We staged it like a private gallery. Each of the four bedrooms became an homage to a designer we admire, dressed with commissioned art paired wall by wall. One was built entirely around a giraffe brooch that had belonged to Princess Mimi, the designer whose costume jewelry once landed on the covers of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, its whole palette pulled from that single piece. The point was to make the pedigree and the scale read at a glance, so buyers felt the history instead of the dust.

The value had been there for half a century. It just needed to be shown.