There is no job too small for Americans to call in professional help.

A new group of specialists is joining the ranks of Christmas-light installers, closet organizers and color consultants: decorators who arrange the household knickknacks.

For hourly fees generally ranging from $50 to $250, these microdesigners, known in the trade as rearrangers or accessorizers, will regroup the potted plants in the foyer, style the paperweight collection on the coffee table, create vignettes of country-style baskets atop kitchen cabinets or spruce up the presentation of the family china. If a client's own prize possessions just don't cut it, the accessorizers are only too happy, for an hourly fee, to shop for new items, culled from local design stores and antiques shops. Some will return each quarter to create seasonally themed displays, incorporating pumpkins in the fall, for instance.

Classes on the art of "tablescaping" are cropping up at community colleges, bridal showers and home parties. There are several trade groups whose members specialize in "use what you have" makeovers; there are several hundred members of the Interior Refiners Network and virtually all offer accessories-only consultations. Some accessorizers report that up to 50 percent of their business is devoted to microdesign projects. Even design heavyweight Mitchell Gold, co-founder of the eponymous furniture brand, says he had a member of his staff come in and style a wall unit in his Hickory, N.C., home. "I had him just edit it out, reorganize it and put in my bulldog collection, nicely spaced, with my artwork," Mr. Gold says.

Home decor and advice on what to do with it is a booming business. Americans spent $14.3 billion on home accessories in 2004, up 21 percent from 2001, according to Home Accents Today, and 64 new shelter magazines launched last year. Meanwhile, retailers are trying to take the guesswork out of decorating. Pottery Barn just teamed up with Benjamin Moore to identify a palette of paint colors that coordinates with the decor chain's products.

Of course, hiring an accessorizer only goes so far, especially when the professional's aesthetic clashes with the client's personal priorities. Simone Sanfilipo, 39, an executive assistant, recently hired a $450-per-room rearranger when she downsized to a smaller house in South Tampa, Fla. She says she was a little miffed when the consultant used a photograph of a distant relative as the central element for an arrangement in her living-room bookcase. "I was like, 'Oh geez, I have no pictures of my children up there, but I have a picture of an aunt who doesn't even call at Christmas.'" After finding a frame to match the ones in the decorator's tableau, Ms. Sanfilipo replaced the offending photo with one of her father.

Lisa Billings, a Dallas-based rearranger, specializes in one-day makeovers. For years, she's done a brisk business rearranging furniture for private clients as well as brokers getting homes ready for sale. But five years ago she began offering a seasonal accessorizing service, periodically returning to her clients' homes to edit the clutter and change out the items on their coffee tables and bookshelves. Now the refresher service has mushroomed into 50 percent of her business, Ms. Billings says.

"We didn't in a million years think we'd go back and see the same clients again over and over," says Ms. Billings, who is the president of another trade group, the Interior Arrangement and Design Association.

Julea Joseph, a Chicago arranger, says that 15 percent of her jobs now involve accessories alone. She is particularly busy in the fall, she says, when clients are preparing their homes for parties. Julie Dana, of East Aurora, N.Y., says that her accessorizing business has doubled in the last five years.

Traditional interior designers tend to scoff at such small-potato projects (though some confess they are offering similar services gratis to favored clients, dropping by before a party, for example, to tweak the dining-room centerpiece). And, they point out, quick-fix rearrangers have little formal training. But rearrangers say they get paid to pay attention to the kinds of details that often get missed in large decorating projects. Also, unlike interior designers, many of whom purchase furniture at a trade discount and make their money from the markup when they resell to clients, rearrangers generally do not provide such a service.

Carolyn Reece hired a pair of high-end interior designers two years ago to decorate her new home in Santa Monica, Calif. She spent about $35,000 on the library and lounge alone, putting in three walls of built-in wood cabinets, custom chenille curtains and a new chair and desk. "But it didn't feel finished," the 45-year-old mother of two recalls. "There was nothing to focus on. The eye just wandered."

So she called in an accessorizer to assess the situation. Two hours later, Tara Riceberg had arranged oversize candles and wood carvings, taken from other parts of the house, on the side tables and mantel, and art-directed the bookshelves, adding family photos and decorative storage boxes. The Los Angeles-based decorator, whose two-year-old practice is called Tweak, finished off the look with a grouping of globes she selected from her client's collection. (Tweak expanded to Washington, D.C., and New York City last year.) "It made a huge difference," says Ms. Reece, who happily shelled out $350 for the two-hour consult. Now she wants to have her bathroom and closet done, too. "I don't have time to sit around and accessorize my home."

Skeptics say that editing the family memorabilia in the service of a more sophisticated design scheme can undermine the very meaning of home. Obsessed with the desire to create a magazine-perfect effect, homeowners run the risk of winding up with just that -- rooms with a view but very little soul.

Without intimate -- if less artful -- objects on display, houses can start to look like hotel rooms: nice, but impersonal, says Winifred Gallagher, author of "House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live" (HarperCollins). Ms. Gallagher says baby shoes, elementary-school ceramics and family photos, while hardly high design, are "personal shrines" of meaning. "These items aren't just trivial little tchotchkes," Ms. Gallagher says. "They are key reminders to people about their identity."

No one knows that better than Jane Phillips, 48, a real-estate agent in Dallas. Before she took off on her honeymoon two years ago, Ms. Phillips gave her interior decorator the house keys and 10 boxes filled with photos, candles and travel souvenirs, and asked her to arrange them throughout her and her husband's sparsely accessorized 8,000-square-foot home. The couple returned to a house filled with $30,000 worth of new bric-a-brac, including pricey candlesticks, fake antique books and artificial potted palms. Ms. Phillips was shocked. "Everything was beautiful, but it wasn't mine. All my treasures were still in a box."

Still, some people just don't trust their own taste. Virtually every corner of Debbie Malovan's Homer Glen, Ill., home has been styled by Julea Joseph, who charges $150 an hour, from the presentation in the china cabinet to the grouping of tall vases in front of her fireplace. "I can arrange the same pieces that she does, but hers come out so much nicer," says Ms. Malovan, 45, owner of an auto-body shop.

Others say that once they've had their home styled by a professional, they're reluctant to make any changes without further consultation. And, if something is moved -- for a party, say, or to repaint a room -- they take pictures beforehand so the design can be reproduced exactly.

The craft follows its own design guidelines, many of which are adapted from the world of retail display. Ms. Riceberg uses what she calls the "pyramid" rule, which says that objects should be arranged from the tallest to the shortest. Rearrangers also cite the rule of odds, which says that items look best arranged in groups of three, five, or seven, for example, rather than in even numbers.

Another common error: keeping things evenly spaced when they should be clumped. "People are too symmetrical," says Ms. Joseph. "On a mantle they do mirror, topiary, topiary. Ugh." In fact, the mistakes can begin even earlier than that -- during a shopping trip. The current trends favor king-size accent pieces like giant pieces of coral and large potted orchids, but many homeowners like to buy little bud vases and shells.

For Jennifer Wong, 39, the owner of a consulting firm in Portland, Ore., not having to think about the details is "pure bliss." Ms. Wong, whose home is decorated with mid-century furniture, recently enlisted the services of Martie Accuardi, who calls herself a microdesigner and charges $75 an hour, to curate her mantelpiece. Not only does Ms. Accuardi style her client's existing decor, she augments it with pieces she brings in from her small home store. As part of her service, every few months she swaps out the old accessories and brings in new ones, adding seasonal accents.

Ms. Accuardi's display "serves its place on my mantle and then it goes away," Ms. Wong says."I'm at the stage in my life when I'm not interested in having 20 pairs of candlesticks."