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Arranging moves and sofas
Designer calms the chaos of moving

IDEAS AT WORK by CHERYL HALL

Interior designer brings order to the disorder of changing residences

Debra Devlin calls her business Smooth Moves by Designers Inc., but she figures she's really selling stress relief.

The 51-year-old Dallas interior designer has taken a turnkey move where a company packs, transports, unpacks and places all the furnishings and added interior design services to either end of the haul.

"A stress-free move sounds like an oxymoron," says Ms. Devlin, who reshaped her interior design business into a moving service three years ago. "Why stress out? Why not pay somebody to take over one of the worst jobs in your entire life and have that person be a designer who can make your home look fabulous?"

Need your current house "staged" for a quick sell? Ms. Devlin will spruce up, weed out and rearrange your furnishings to cast your old abode in a new light.

Want to walk into your new place and have it look like a showplace instead of a storage locker? Ms. Devlin will have furniture arranged, pictures hung, music playing and candles lit when you cross the threshold.

"When clients walk into the house for the first time, it's so much fun for me," she says. 'Sometimes you open a closet to move the stuff and think, 'Oh my God,
they really need us.' We group things by color so that their new closets look like Neiman's when we're finished with them."

Ms. Devlin hires packers, movers and a supporting cast to undo, hook up and even dog-sit if necessary. Or you can do the hiring if you prefer.

Want indoor plants that won't croak in a month? She'll bring in a plant specialist.
There is one rule: You have to disappear until she's ready to unveil her work.

"If people come over alter the first day of packing or unpacking, you're talking serious stress," she says. "They can't see the method to my madness."

In 1991, just after her 40th birthday, Debra Devlin was asked a question that stumped her. "What's your passion?" a friend queried.

Twice divorced - most recently from Jim Devlin, co-founder and chief executive of the long-distance service that ultimately became Sprint PCS - her life was filled with family and social obligations, not personal fulfillment.

"It was the most confounding question I'd ever been asked," she recalls. "I became determined to figure out what I was meant to be when I grew up."

Pulling it all together

As the wife of a jet-setting executive Ms. Devlin had outfitted a couple of well-appointed homes. She loved the feeling she got from pulling the elements together.

She enrolled at El Centro Community College and discovered that her intuition was right. Ms. Devlin completed an associate degree in interior design in 1994 after an internship with Tricia Wilson's design firm.

Soon she decided to start her own company. "I come from a whole family of entrepreneurs, so working for someone else when I was 43 just didn't work in my head," Ms. Devlin says.

Ms. Devlin got the idea for Smooth Moves by Designers as she helped Realtors get clients' houses ready for the market. "The more refined term is furniture rearrangement," she says, "but I call it the push and shove.
"I also edit," Ms. Devlin says as she hooks an umpire's thumb. "That means outta here."

Maybe the Oriental rugs are placed in the wrong direction or the room's flow is off.

Ms. Devlin has a quick eye for fixing potential buyer turnoffs, real estate agents say.

"The longer people live in a home, the more certain they are that it's set up perfectly," says Betty Tatum of Adleta & Poston Realtors in Dallas. "Debbi is so gentle and calm that she never offends an owner when she tells them it's not."

Some homeowners were so pleased with the transformation that they asked her to arrange their new homes once they moved. She decided to bridge the gap.

This year, she expects Smooth Moves to transplant a couple of dozen households from downsizing retirees to kid-loaded families expanding into large houses.

Clients typically pay between $2,000 for a small relocation to $10,000 for a larger, more complicated residence. Her portion of that runs $75 an hour.

Snake handling is extra. And yes, she's moved a boa. "I'm scared to death of snakes, so I made sure they'd fed it its small critter ration before we took over."

One client had lived in her University Park home for 63 years before moving into a two bedroom unit at the Edgemere retirement community.
"More than anything, I was a hand-holder for her" says Ms. Devlin, who determined what furnishings would fit, what needed to be cast off and what smaller pieces to buy.

Another client, who'd lived with her daughter for 22 years, moved into an assisted-living facility last year. "Debbi saw the way my mother liked things placed," says the daughter, who wants to protect her mother's privacy. "Debbi was able to recreate her living space in miniature, which made my mother immediately more comfortable with the move."

Ms. Devlin's company will do an after-move setup just unpacking and placing furniture for about $1,200. "If somebody's already moved into their house and they're overwhelmed with the confusion, they can call me to create natural order."

Household Name
Ms. Devlin has kept her company's revenue in the six-figure range despite the current hard times in the interior design field. "Once I move somebody, when they need an interior designer, I'm already a household name."

Linda Berg, Dallas-Fort Worth president of Coldwell Banker, and her husband, John Wealdey, just completed their third move in three years under Ms. Devlin's purview.

They first hired her to set up their Dallas high-rise apartment after the couple relocated from California in May 2000.

"We had placed everything where we thought it might work," recalls Ms. Berg. "But then Debbi came in and kicked us out. When we came back, our place had no resemblance to what we left."

They moved a year later and naturally sought Ms. Devlin's guidance. When they bought a spacious house in University Park earlier this year, well...
"The thought of moving without Debbi is impossible," says Ms. Berg. "She works with things you already have, and creates drama and flair. She lets you see where the holes are, so you can fill them over time without making a lot of mistakes."

No move takes longer than six days, says Ms. Devlin, with a typical one done in four or five.The kitchen is packed, moved and re-established before the rest of the household is transferred. "There's more boxes in the kitchen than anywhere else in the house," she explains.
Most of the time, the master bathroom and closet go in advance, too. "If you get all that havoc out of the way, the rest of the move goes much smoother. It's part of an orchestrated dance.

She has other tips for people on the move:

• Don't fall into the storage trap. Find a use for grandma's antique highboy within a couple of months or get rid of it. Temporary storage space tends to become a permanent black hole.
• If you're moving into a mid or high-rise building, reserve an elevator ahead of time. "If you don't," she warns, "you'll be dead in the water when your movers get there."
• Don't pinch pennies with utilities. Hook up electricity, water, phone service and cable three or four days before the move, and keep them on at the old place for a few days afterward for cleanup.
• Don't buy furniture until you've settled into your space and have a sense of scale. Too often, things either overwhelm or look like doll furniture.

"You may want everything to be perfect the day that you move in," she says. "But you need to relax in your house and see how you use each room for a while. Then you can fill in the holes with what's really needed."

Ms. Devlin likens her work to that of a good hairdresser who knows how to deal with thin hair, thick locks and cowlicks.
"When you start to unpack people's lives out of boxes, you see who they are and what's important to them "she says. "Things become obvious, even if I've never spent much time with my clients."

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