DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.
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9.14.2018 | DIGS.NET 37 MERIDITH BAER HOME 310.204.5353 MERIDITHBAER.COM "I don't know if I told you I grew up on a prison reservation. I mean, what's uglier and more depressing than a prison?" asks Meridith Baer with a chuckle. e designer and founder of home staging giant Meridith Baer Home is talking beau, and making it happen where it's scarce. It's a skill she's perfected since childhood. e daughter of a prison warden, Baer learned at an early age to create a world of her own making. To play and handcra games, fun and wonder out of thin air. "You do the best with what you have, where you have it," says the designer. "And you take some risks," she adds. "You get up and do something different." She's taken this advice to heart, and this year celebrates 20 years of rather stunning success with Meridith Baer Home, a company she spun from her imagination and two hands. In the late 1990s, Baer, then an actress and script writer, was in between rental homes. A woman of modest means and fabulous taste, she had lots of furniture, art and decor, not to mention a massive plant collection—but nowhere to put it. A developer friend, whose unfurnished, high- end home on the Westside had been sitting on the market, let Baer perform her decorating magic in the home. She did and the proper sold quickly, and well above the asking price. At the time, home staging was not done, a situation Baer would change. A real estate agent who heard about the successful sale asked Baer to "furnish" another home. en another. She rode the momentum to create Meridith Baer Home, the nation's staging company, with a list of who's who celebri clients and an army of designers working around the nation. Doing the best with what you have, indeed. "I got kicked out of my house," explains Baer. "But then I put the furniture in a house someone was selling, and it sold for half a million over asking, and now I have a $100 million company." Headquartered in Los Angeles, which is also home to the company's design warehouse spanning over 300,000 square feet, Meridith Baer Home has offices in San Francisco, New York, Miami and the Hamptons. When we speak in mid-July of this year, her company had already staged 1,600 homes—a record. Baer's firm also does interior design and leases luxury furnishings. For those in a hurry, there's Instant Home, where designers can furnish a proper in as little as two weeks, based on a single consultation. "I'm super proud of the company, and the group of people I work with that built it," says Baer. "It has a life of its own now, with all these great designers and business development people and crew. It's a machine." e idea of taking something undesirable or unwanted and giving it a new, positive life is summed up in a cheeky mantra Baer is fond of. "Chaff to gold," we'll call it here. "It's basically taking something that no one wants, or something that doesn't matter, and turning it into gold," says Baer, who constantly applies it to design—turning cast-off gates into charmed decor or fashioning a gathering of branches into sophisticated centerpieces. Even bad situations can be steered to the positive. is has been Baer's belief since childhood, and for the last 20 years, she's applied it rather spectacularly to her company, which continues its spiral upward. "I want to work seven days a week," she says exuberantly. "I'm doing what I love." Staging by Meridith Baer Home in New York (top) and California (bottom).