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The Art of the Floor Plan: Capturing a Home, Line by Line In the fiercely competitive game of marketing homes, brokers go to great lengths to cast a property in its most flattering light, sanding down rough edges, cleaning out clutter, loading in new furniture and hiring professional photographers to make the glossy images that lure salivating buyers to weekend open houses.

tiffany & co outlet Enlarge This Image Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times After he surveyed the space, Mr. Wenger drew floor plans using his own custom graph paper and an assortment of colored pens. But there is another important part of the package, one that seems almost mechanical in its black-and-white simplicity yet is often the result of careful consideration and artistic license: the floor plan.

tiffany jewelry outlet “I love photos, but people can get turned off if they see furniture that looks like something that your grandmother might have used,” or a wall color they do not like, said Gerald Makowski, who oversees marketing at Halstead Property and has made building a database of pristine plans something of a mission at the company. “Floor plans are more of a neutral backdrop for them to see what’s in the apartment” and how the rooms relate to one another, he said. And that is where Lou Wenger and a coterie of graphic designers who specialize in floor plans come in. Armed with a laser distance measurer, his own custom graph paper and an assortment of colored pens, Mr. Wenger creates floor plans for many established real estate agencies, including Halstead, Brown Harris Stevens and Gumley Haft Kleier.

tiffany outlet For years, brokers started with existing floor plans from a collection of telephone-directory-size binders, Mr. Makowski said, but those have become less useful because they are often copies with blurred or incomplete lines and illegible writing that do not look good on the Web. Although agencies still use layouts from the books, many are turning to independent draftsmen to draw floor plans from scratch.

tiffany rings “I think my floor plans are the prettiest,” Mr. Wenger said at his cramped home office on the Upper East Side, which is lined with DVDs of movies and old “Columbo” episodes. “Sometimes you look at a plan and they keep it as generic as they can, and I like to try to reflect it — without going totally nuts, O.K.? — as it really appears. If something has rounded edges I’ll do what I can to try to make it look pleasing that way.” Mr. Wenger, a former photographer, got his start in real estate as an agent, he said, but found he did not have the knack for renting out apartments. Realizing agents could use better materials to market their listings, he persuaded his boss to let him photograph the apartments and included floor plans in the portfolios he created. He eventually dropped the photography and focused solely on the drawings, through his company, Floorplansource. He charges $250 for the first 1,000 square feet, and 12 cents a square foot above that.

tiffany earringsHe begins by surveying the space, measuring the overall dimensions of the room. He takes care to point the laser so it captures the distance from wall to wall, free of intrusions like molding or radiator covers. With a graphite mechanical pencil, he draws the walls and windows, marking measurements in red; doorways, openings and passageways in green; and fixtures and built-ins in blue, so that he and his freelance designers can quickly identify each element when they redo the layouts on the computer. He indicates the relative thickness of walls through the thickness of the lines — although they are estimates based on general building practices in different types of buildings rather than architectural or engineering records. He marks where there are windows, fixtures and anything cutting into the space, like columns, a process that often involves a surprising degree of estimation. “On a final floor plan, you’re not going to see the dimensions of a column — the columns are just going to be there proportionally. That’s why the exact measurements aren’t that important,” he said. “The room measurements are, because that’s going to be recorded, that’s what people want to know.” tiffany bracelet Placing the fixtures, like toilets, sinks and bathtubs, is important because it allows buyers to see where the plumbing is — and where they could slip in an extra powder room or bath. Sometimes, Mr. Wenger said, brokers will ask him to alter details, like making a window wider than it really is, to better reflect what they say is the feeling of a room. He will accommodate those requests, although too much of that can backfire. Looking at a floor plan for 75 1/2 Bedford Street — the narrowest house in the city at about nine and a half feet wide outside, eight and a half inside and currently for sale for $4.3 million through Town Residential — he said the illustrator could have made it look wider by drawing the walls thicker. “But it doesn’t pay,” Mr. Wenger said. “People get in there and say it feels narrower than in the floor plan. Don’t call it orange juice if it’s lemonade. It is what it is.”