92 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM available in the warehouse, then delegate items across a number of projects—all while making each and every home look like a cohesive whole. Like a chess player, Coco must think several steps ahead. Except the pieces she’s business, Coco incorporated items from thrift and antique stores as well as pieces from her own home. “I’d have the box of my favorites,” she says. Like the print of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring given to her by her mother. “When I first started staging, that went into all of my houses.” Once in a while, it still makes a comeback. Coco moves away from the main part of the warehouse to a side room with all kinds of treasures. Sculptures and serving trays, impressive bottles of whisky and gin, a pair of gilded antlers and endless other homey knickknacks ensure that no coffee table or bookshelf in one of Coco’s homes goes naked. There’s an abundance of wicker baskets and ottomans. Heaps of throw blankets and pillows (fluffy, patterned and tasseled). A bounty of books organized in color-coded stacks with inviting titles like The Time-Traveling Fashionista, The Diary of Frida Kahlo, Bad Girls Throughout History and How to Boil an Egg. “I think my home looks very moving are coffee tables and couches. “You constantly have to pivot,” she notes. But for Coco, it’s in her blood. “My mom was Pinterest before Pinterest—always changing furniture and building couches out of cement blocks,” Coco recalls fondly. “We’d wake up to a whole new living room.” Don’t get the wrong idea. Staging and interior design are “two completely different animals,” Coco observes. “Interior design is permanent. It’s lifestyle. How are your kids going to wear and tear this piece of furniture? Do you have dogs? Is it comfortable?” On the other hand, “Staging is an illusion. It is setting a set. It’s a prop house. We look at all the angles, at where the shot’s going to be and how it’s going to photograph, the size and scale of furniture.” Though she sources everything wholesale these days, in the scrappy early days of her PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF SO GOLD MARKETING/ COURTESY OF EVOKE MEDIA {home & design}
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