Why staging company Vesta Home scooped up a design firm

Looking to grow your design firm? You’d be forgiven for not considering “be acquired by a national staging business,” but that’s precisely what happened earlier this month when Vesta Home purchased South Florida design firm Krista + Home. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Vesta Home is no stranger to acquisitions. Since its 2017 founding by CEO Julian Buckner, the Los Angeles–area startup has expanded rapidly by scooping up regional staging companies across the country (six in total.) In 2023, it also acquired the rental furniture companies Fernish and Feather—a dual purchase that allowed Vesta to not only stage homes for sale but outfit newly purchased spaces (Vesta has since folded Feather into Fernish). Though the company already offers interior design services through its in-house team, the acquisition of Krista + Home marks Vesta’s first foray into purchasing an outside design firm.

“What we were seeing from our home staging work was this huge demand for that next level of interior design services,” says Buckner. “We offer those services elsewhere in the country, but given the sophistication and the concentration of wealth in the South Florida market, we wanted to provide [our clients with] something that was next level.”

Krista + Home, a Palm Beach Gardens–based firm led by founder Krista Alterman, seemed to provide the perfect partner, with solid roots in the community after 15 years in business, along with a slew of industry accolades and a deep familiarity with the region’s high-end clientele. It came at the right time for Alterman, too, who had been on the lookout in recent years for the right opportunity to take her firm to the next level. After seeing other design businesses forge intriguing partnerships to scale up—Kelly Wearstler and Proper Hotels, Studio McGee and Summit Estate—she felt the offer from Vesta was exactly what her firm needed.

“Nowadays in the design industry, there’s such a trend to collaborate instead of compete. It’s that shared vision that fuels brand growth,” says Alterman, who will be staying in her leadership role, along with the rest of the 20-person team. “That was the impetus. It’s a way to join forces, to grow smarter and not just bigger.”

Perhaps the biggest asset for Alterman’s firm will be Vesta’s infrastructure. According to Buckner, roughly 60 percent of his company’s operations are devoted to staging—the rest focus on interior design and trade services, including in-house product design, sourcing and procurement departments. For Krista + Home, that means newfound resources (like Vesta’s logistics network and its 50,000-square-foot warehouse in South Florida) to power faster timelines and better access to high-end furnishings.

“It’s a luxury-meets-scale sensibility, where our clients can now enjoy the best of both worlds—our high-touch, personalized experience of design paired with the speed and efficiency and reach of a larger operation like Vesta,” she says.

For Vesta, the benefits of the acquisition are simple—it takes the company one step closer to becoming a one-stop shop in the home buying and selling process. Buckner outlines how the process might unfold: A person selling their home can stage it with Vesta, then hire Krista + Home to design their new space—and while they’re waiting for the design process to be completed, they can rent furniture from Vestato test out potential options or fill their empty house as they wait (an asset in South Florida’s rarefied luxury market, where Alterman has seen clients purchase a smaller house just to wait out the renovation and design process in their main property). “It’s a full life cycle for real estate buyers and sellers,” says Buckner.

While Buckner says Vesta would be open to similar acquisitions in other markets, it’s not an immediate part of the company’s growth strategy. For now, he is eager to watch the new arm of the business unfold—while Alterman’s firm embarks on the rare opportunity to take its operations to a much larger scale in one fell swoop.

“It’s exciting to have the ability to grow nationally, to help the Vesta team understand how we work and our processes that we’ve put in place to make the process of high-end interior design efficient and connected with our clients along the way,” says Alterman. “The thought and the ability to grow into other markets is definitely exciting for us, and we’re really here to do whatever is best for Vesta and K+H to continue the positive direction and momentum of that growth.”