Before she began her career staging homes, “speed-decorator” Jill Vegas worked in advertising. And that was a valuable experience, because when you’re selling your home, you should treat it just like a treatment for a thirty-second commercial.

I asked Jill, who’s been home staging for nearly a decade in Manhattan (she’s great at arranging outdoor Fall colors, too, btw), how she uses her advertising background to coach her clients to rethink their property to get a better price. I think she’s got some great and useful insights.

“The one thing I tell clients, which relates to advertising, is, ‘What’s your opening frame?’ which translates into the environment I was doing in advertising—the retail experience. When someone walks in the door of your home, are they going to feel seduction and want to buy into a lifestyle and make a purchase, or not? Where are people going to look? It’s about really curating what that experience would be like for a consumer.”

“Uplighting in dark corners will create drama and bring lightness to a room that used to be dark.”   — Jill Vegas

One of the first things you should be thinking about is lighting.

“There are three key parts to lighting,” Jill told me. “If you’re using only overhead light, that can be really harsh and make a room feel vacuous. I like to have another light source, at table-lamp height. The beauty of that source of lighting is that it really traps a romantic glow on a room. Also, I suggest installing sconces; they do a gorgeous job of diffusing the light upwards, casting a warm light at eye level, highlighting crown molding and ceiling molding, and it’s really dramatic.

“The other source of light that’s really important is some sort of uplighting in dark corners, and that will also create drama and bring lightness to a room that used to be dark. You don’t want to people to see that—it’s more of a hidden light, something you can put behind a sofa or behind a chair. You don’t see it but it’s a source of light.”