Monday, April 13, 2009

Thieves with taste

California has given us another first, the tasteful thief.
It is a common ploy here and elsewhere to have professional decorators “stage” unoccupied homes that are on the market with borrowed furnishings and appointments to help fetch top dollar, especially now that real estate sales have wilted like a week-old flower arrangement.

But along with fragrant jasmine and wisteria in bloom, there is caution in the air here. The same painstaking efforts to attract buyers have also attracted thieves.

An unusual wave of burglaries has hit unoccupied houses for sale in this affluent 1.8-square-mile bedroom community in the hills east of Oakland, and it is testing the forced cheerfulness of real estate agents who are already reeling. Last weekend, two staged houses were burglarized in nearby Orinda, a wealthy suburb, robbed in the morning hours before planned afternoon open houses.

“It’s brazen,” said D. J. Grubb, the president of the Grubb Company, a real estate agency based in Oakland. “These are highly aesthetic crimes. The thief seems to be someone with very good taste, somebody who knows that mauve is out.”
Dear God! I had no idea mauve is out.

Comments:
Not "mauve is out of fashion." Mauve is never in good taste.
 

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