Now that the New Year is here, many of us will tackle new home improvement projects or old ones that didn't get done in 2009. Santa has promised me that shelving system that was on my holiday wish list, but I am still waiting for it to be installed. I hope to paint and furnish a new bedroom for my daughters, and perhaps finally furnish our dining room/living room. But one project that I haven't considered is creating a soundtrack for my home.
I guess I am behind the times -- according to an article written by New York Times columnist Kate Murphy and published on MercuryNews.com, trendy homeowners across the world are paying "music stylists" -- at fees that range from $50 to $250 per hour of music -- to create personalized soundtracks to match the décor and feel of their homes. To create these soundtracks, stylists will marry your décor to your musical tastes. Once created, the personalized playlists are loaded onto ipods or CDs, Murphy says.
Apparently, playing a genre of music that doesn't match your home's architecture or décor is a major faux pas: "Hearing the wrong music in the wrong space can be very disorienting," one music stylist is quoted as saying, or as Murphy puts it, you might not expect to hear Metallica playing in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment filled with 18th-century antiques.
One client mentioned in the article hires a music stylist to update the playlists for his rustic lodge in Aspen and for his Colonial home in Palm Beach, Fla, four times a year. One homeowner profiled by Murphy commissioned a stylist to create soundtracks for each room of his Hamptons vacation house, asking for "cheesy" romantic music for his bedroom. "That was one of those times when you learned more about the client than you wanted to know," Murphy quotes the stylist as saying.
Now, I am sure that the music played in my home -- a mixture of current pop songs, a little folk and classical music with some Disney songs thrown in -- doesn't create the kind of ambiance that a music stylist would approve. But I think it suits us just fine. I don't see the need to spend a few hundred dollars to get my home its own personal playlist.
But, were I to put my home on the market and try to stage it to appeal to buyers, maybe then a personalized -- or well-chosen -- playlist might be of use. I am sure buyers would feel more comfortable if they were to walk into my family room and find it warmed by a fire in the fireplace and filled with the sounds of a violin concerto than by what they would most likely find today -- a room filled with toys and a Disney Princess movie on the TV. —Lauren Baier Kim