It is an open secret that premium properties often go to market in borrowed clothes. Specialist designers select and style everything from curtains to cutlery — even filling fridges with photogenic snacks. The value — and style — of the pictures on the walls can also send out important signals.

“To my clients, art is indicative of the wealth and substance of the vendor,” says Robert Bailey, founder of Robert Bailey Properties, a high-end buying agency that works with clients who have budgets that run into millions of pounds.

“If they see cheap prints in a £5m place, buyers think the property must be the vendor’s main asset and that he must need the money more than someone with a Fabergé desk set and a couple of Picassos in the lobby. The Picassos make the buyer a bit less inclined to chip them (make a low offer) on the price.”

Estate agents agree. Tom Tangney, an associate at Knight Frank, based in Kensington, has seen the placing of a few carefully chosen paintings work miracles in shifting “sticky” properties.

“We had a £4.75m house in Upper Phillimore Gardens, whose owners moved to Australia, and it looked sad,” Tangney says. “It had been on the books for several months when we got in designers to furnish the entertainment areas and main bedroom, with particular attention to the pictures on the walls — some portraits and landscapes and some contemporary art. It sold in a couple of days.”

The wonder workers in this case were Parkworth Interiors. Founders Christina Parker and Priscilla Illingworth, and their partner Ben Bambrough, have 20 years’ experience in pepping up flats and houses for sale, and are convinced the right art gives a property an edge.

“People know what houses are worth nowadays, so what we do is not about adding a great deal more value,” says Parker. “It is about making someone fall in love with a place. What seduces you is a beautiful sculpture: it catches your eye.”

Parkworth borrows art from galleries, dealers, even from the artists themselves. Toby Campbell of Rafael Valls, a St James’s picture gallery, for example recently lent a pair of 17th-century landscapes by Flemish artist Sebastian Vrancx, worth £300,000, for the entrance hall of a house in Cadogan Square that sold in May at slightly less than the £14m asking price.

Parkworth even persuaded Lincoln Seligman, known for his huge, site-specific public art (including a 12ft-high, stainless-steel sculpture at Battersea Reach), to loan a painting for one project.

The cost varies according to the size of a property. A 12-week contract — normally enough time for a property to sell — for a two-bedroom flat is likely to be £5,000-£6,000. Fitting out a house could be double that.

So what kind of art works best? There is no doubt contemporary works, such as Seligman’s, are ideal for modern, white-walled interiors. “I see lots of Damien Hirsts and Antony Gormleys,” says Jonathan Hewlett, a director of Savills, based at their Sloane Street branch. “Old Masters are out.”

Helen Green, an interior designer who has worked with Hewlett, puts lots of effort into the choice of piece. “The wrong artworks date a property more than anything else.”

Green finds that in the spacious houses of Kensington colourful, large-scale, non-figurative works hit the spot. Her favourite pieces include Carole Graslan’s vivid abstracts, lit with John Cullen halogen picture lights. “Good framing and lighting is an important trick,” she says.

Bailey’s Russian buyers have different tastes. “They go for ambassadorial residences such as Kensington Palace Gardens properties, and generally like lots of white stucco or stone on the outside and opulent interiors with sweeping staircases,” he says. “They like 18th-century portraits, big oils in ormolu frames, and large religious paintings.”

Developers are also using art to appeal to the nostalgia of thirtysomething buyers. In One Islington Place, a high-spec, high-tech development in north London on sale at £2.95m, comic-book superheroes and cinema gangsters sit alongside children’s animation art from the 1970s. They include Paul Mellia canvases of Spiderman and the Hulk (worth about £23,500); pop art by Steve Kaufman including a painting of Al Pacino in The Godfather (£5,000) for the games room; a “Mister Greedy” in the kitchen and a “Mister Messy” (£95) in the bathroom.

Representing the edgier, more urban end of the market, a £4.15m penthouse at Paddington Walk, Paddington Basin, has been decorated by Tara Bernerd’s firm Target Living. Finishing touches to its bachelor-pad-meets-boutique-hotel decor were borrowed from Hamiltons gallery, which specialises in contemporary photography.

In the sitting room hangs a Warhol-style photo by David LaChapelle, acclaimed photographer of celebrities and director of pop videos such as Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty. The portrait of the artist’s transsexual muse, entitled “Amanda Lepore (Marilyn)” 2002, is the only detail of the decor not included in the asking price, as it has been lent from the private collection of Tim Jefferies, a friend of Bernerd and director of Hamiltons gallery.

Most of the artwork in homes that have been dressed is for sale, for the simple reason that the people who buy the properties often want to buy the art, too.

“The Russians are the ones who like to buy the whole lot,” says Parker. “If they are new in town, they don’t yet have an address book of people to make them curtains, or where to go to buy sofas. And they won’t know where to buy art.”

Parkworth Interiors, 020 7384 4448; Target Living, 020 7823 2316, www.targetliving.com

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