LEWISTON — Elisa Viscarelli owns Studio V Home Staging and travels all over Maine for her clients.
For those who want some help getting their home or business ready for the season, Viscarelli has added holiday home decorating to her portfolio, joining other businesses nationwide who have seen the potential market for professional decorating.
A landscaping company in Texas that started stringing holiday lights for customers in 1986 is credited with being among the first to offer holiday home lighting. Today, Christmas Decor is a specialty holiday decorating and lighting business with 300 franchises in the U.S. and Canada.
Companies such as Christmas Decor will light up the exterior of your house, then take it all down after the holidays and store your lighting. Pricing starts at $250 for a small, single-story home and goes up to as much as $5,000 or more for larger homes with digital effects and special designs.
The president and CEO of Christmas Decor, Brandon Stephens, said the average installation cost for a residential home is around $2,400.
Business, Stephens said, is good.
“The business in Maine is following suit with the rest of the country,” he said. “The industry has been growing steadily, and we are getting service to a much broader group of people than we were five years ago.”
Stephens says residential and commercial business are both up, adding commercial has grown at a faster rate.
If it’s the interior of your home you want to focus on, decorators and stagers will do the work, with prices starting at around $350 for a basic job. The size of the home, the decorations used, design planning, take down and storage are factors that can raise the cost.
Viscarelli worked for a trade show company when the COVID pandemic hit. She and thousands of others in the industry lost their jobs overnight as the in-person meeting industry was forced to shut down.
Viscarelli started painting a house for a local builder. “I had lost my job, so this was the only direction that was an option for me was painting to make money,” she said. The Auburn house she painted was listed by Realtor and broker Michelle Gosselin, who owns Home At Last Realty.
Both are from the Waterville area — Viscarelli from Fairfield and Gosselin from Oakland — and they clicked and soon became friends. They began staging Gosselin’s listings together and started a staging company.
Gosselin quickly figured out she was too busy with her real estate business and turned the staging over to Viscarelli, who has been staging and decorating for four years.
“It’s fantastic to have someone else do the work for us,” Gosselin said with a big smile. “To come home and it’s all done.”
Viscarelli has been decorating the Gosselin-Ervin home for three years and calls it a “collaborative” process.
“I just like being creative and even if it’s something already existing here and turning it into something like that,” Viscarelli said, referring to a burgundy vase that she repurposed to become a focal point in a corner of the house. “We needed something.”
Since 2005, the home decorating and lighting business is estimated at $6 billion a year and growing, based on reporting from the National Retail Federation. Holiday home decorating is expanding to include Halloween, Hanukkah and other family celebrations.
The market has drawn a lot of new businesses in recent years, Stephens said, but his customer base continues to grow.
“We anticipate continued growth in spite of an influx of competition in almost all markets,” Stephens points out.
For traditionalists, all is not lost, as two out of three families still enjoy decorating their home for the holidays according to Angie’s List. However, more families with children and busy schedules are opting for professional help, leading to a growing industry.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why people like Viscarelli are making home holiday decorating a part of their business plan — they see that there are more people willing to spend the money, reduce the stress of decorating and add a critical eye on the design and look of their home.
