Actress moves to home stage

Summerlin woman goes from soap stardom to real estate design

By JAN HOGAN
VIEW STAFF WRITER

Interior designers for TV shows can take a stage set and do a room makeover like nobody's business. Perhaps no one knows that better than Mary O'Brien.

She starred on the soap opera "General Hospital" as a teenager. She played the nasty Heather Grant for three years in the early 1980s.

The whole time, she was intrigued over how those designers transformed sets to meet the needs of the show.

Now O'Brien uses what she learned from those years in TV to stage homes that are going on the real estate market. O'Brien and her business partner, Marta Lister, formed Improving Spaces (www.improvingspaceslv.com) in 2004.

The two neighbors met while walking their dogs. A friendship ensued and both discovered they shared a love of interior decorating. Since they formed their company, they've been very busy.

"In those cases, we do the thing like on TV," O'Brien said. "We tell them to close their eyes before they walk into the room."

"We hope they cry, but in a good way," Lister added.

Shannon Lattimore, a school teacher, and her husband, Mike, an entrepreneur, admitted their home was "a complete mess" when they decided to sell it. They called Improving Spaces to get things under control.

"They made it organized, inviting and classy," Shannon Lattimore said. "It took just one day to sell it and the people who bought it, they even paid more than we had it listed for."

When prospective buyers look at a house, many of them will focus on the kitchen and bathrooms. So Improving Spaces clears the countertops and adds a candle or two.

Jay and Heidi Pieper weren't selling their home, they just wanted help making it more manageable. Part of the problem was her attachment to dogs. Besides the five they own, Heidi Pieper collected every little dog-themed item she could find.

"We knew things were out of control when my husband, sitting on the living room couch, could count 54 dog things, just from that one location," she said.

Besides staging, their house received a full makeover -- new interior paint and window treatments, new flooring and new light fixtures.

"It looks like a model home," Heidi Pieper said. "It's so beautiful you want to keep it extra, extra clean."

Improving Spaces also will stage homes for holiday celebrations.