Decorating small apartment: 8 tips

Small budget or a downtown apartment? Then chances are you live small. A cozy apartment or studio is charming, but furnishing it is not always easy. A nice cabinet or a beautiful plant quickly gets in the way. Yet you can decorate a small apartment perfectly nicely, without losing functionality. We give you 8 handy tips for inspiration.

Start with a neutral base
Utilize every inch of your small apartment
Choose multifunctional furniture
Use all vertical space
Separate spaces visually in your small apartment
Make use of optical illusions in your small apartment
Enhance your space with light, light and more light
Keep your space tidy

1. Start with a neutral base

Choose a neutral, light color for your walls. Light colors make the room feel more spacious than dark colors.
Fan of colors? Then work with subtle accents. Give a wall an accent color, choose a piece of furniture in a bright color or provide some colorful accessories. Remember that an accent doesn’t always have to be big to have impact. Also, don’t overdo it. For example, focus on 2 colors. In small spaces, less is always more.

Are you going to paint? Then be sure to read our article 9 Common Mistakes When Painting

2. Utilize every inch of your small apartment

Still room under the bed? Utilize it! At stores like Ikea, or even Action, you can find lots of storage boxes that fit perfectly under your bed. With handy wheels!
Use hanging systems. The word may sound boring, but it’s definitely not! A hanging system allows you to hang pot and pan lids one above the other on the inside your kitchen cabinet.

3. Choose multipurpose furniture

You can get very far in a small apartment with creative thinking:

Use the wide wooden windowsill as a desk.
Utilize a designer storage chest for your fleece blankets also as a coffee table.
Use that one old stool as a vintage side table, too.

4. Use all vertical space

By working in height, you make the room seem taller than it really is:

Don’t forget the unused space between your furniture and the ceiling.
No room for a bookcase? Attach some “floating” shelves to the wall above your sofa or TV cabinet.
If you don’t have enough space for plants, choose small plants and hang them one above the other against the wall.

5. Separate spaces visually in your small apartment

Often we tend to leave rooms open as much as possible. Still, it can be useful to visually separate rooms with different functions:

Of course, you don’t have to put a drywall between the dining room and the kitchen. By strategically placing furniture or plants, you can easily create a partition.
Consider a tall cabinet.
Even with a lick of paint, you easily separate your space.

6. Make use of optical illusions in your small apartment

Extra square magic, unfortunately, is not possible. But there are easy optical illusions with a magical effect:

Hang a big mirror on the wall and your living room suddenly looks twice as big and much brighter.
Work with different layers and contrasts.
Place pillows with contrasting colors and/or patterns in the sofa or go for a rug with a different texture from the background. These playful elements give the room more depth. As a result, it appears optically larger.

7. Enhance your space with light, light and more light

Windows, lamps and mood lighting! A bright room is guaranteed to appear larger than a dark one:

Make sure there are no dark corners in your home.
Make the best use of daylight.
Go for cozy warm ambient light – nothing as unsociable as cold-white fluorescent lights – and again, make clever use of a mirror here, placing it so that it reflects the light.

8. Keep your space tidy

Something the slobs among us don’t like to hear: keep your home tidy:

Hold regular clean-up sessions.
Donate or throw away what you no longer need.
Invest in convenient (vertical) storage systems. That way you create peace in your mind and peace in the space. Win-win.
Clear away lying garments, empty glasses or used paper tissues. Not only do they take up oh-so-necessary space, they also take away the calm.

Sources: BetterHomes&Gardens, Camber, DecorMatters & Dimehouse

Would you like to cite this article as a source? Then use:

N. (2024, Nov. 17). Decorating small apartment: 8 tips. Apartment.com. Accessed on (date XX/XX/202X), from https://www.appartement.be/klein-appartement-inrichten-tips/

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