12 Small Apartment Decorating Ideas That Feel Like Enough

We spent two years in an apartment with one and a half rooms, and most of the small apartment decorating advice we read assumed we would buy our way out of it. The first winter we tried to make it look bigger. We painted the walls the palest thing the store had, bought a mirror the size of a door, and put everything on wheels so it could be moved out of the way. It did not feel bigger. It felt like a room apologizing for itself.

What changed things was giving up on the illusion. A small apartment is small. The question is not how to hide that, it is how to make the space you do have feel finished rather than temporary. Almost everything below costs nothing, or costs less than the storage furniture you were about to buy.

Small Apartment Decorating Ideas That Start With What Stays Out

The fastest change in a small apartment is not what you add. It is deciding which four or five things are allowed to live in the open, and putting the rest away for good. Once that is settled, the rest of the list gets easier.

1. Pick one surface that stays empty

Not tidy – empty. A windowsill, the left half of the table, the top of the chest of drawers. Nothing lives there permanently. In a small room, one clear surface does more for the feeling of space than any amount of clever storage, because it is the only place your eye can rest.

An oak sideboard in a small apartment kept nearly clear, catching the afternoon light, while the shelf above it holds everyday things — Pick the surface that stays clear before every surface becomes a landing place.

It will fill up. You clear it again. After a few weeks it stops filling up.

2. Buy furniture that stands on legs

You can see the floor underneath a sofa on legs, and the room reads as continuous rather than chopped into blocks. This is the one piece of standard small-space advice we would keep. Solid-to-the-floor storage units are the opposite: useful, and they make a room feel like a corridor.

A small apartment photographed low, every piece standing on slim raised legs with continuous oak floorboards running unbroken beneath — Continuous floor is what the eye uses to judge the size of a room.

If replacing the sofa is not happening, raising the bed on legs has the same effect and costs the price of four bed risers.

3. Hang art low and in one place

The instinct in a small apartment is to spread pictures around so every wall has something. It makes the walls feel busy and the room feel smaller. Put them together, in one group, hung lower than feels correct – center around eye height when seated, not standing. One considered wall and three quiet ones beats four medium ones.

A tight group of five small framed pictures hung low above a bench, with the rest of the plaster walls bare — Low, grouped, and in one place. Art at standing height floats above everything.

4. Use full-height curtains even on a short window

Rod near the ceiling, fabric to the floor, regardless of where the actual window sits. The eye reads the whole panel as the window. It is the cheapest thing on this list and the one people notice without knowing what they are noticing. We wrote about this in more detail in our small living room ideas.

Oat linen curtains hung from a rod fixed under the ceiling and falling to the floor, more than twice the height of the short window behind them — The rod goes at the ceiling regardless of where the window stops.

5. Let one piece be too big

A small room full of small furniture looks like a doll’s house. One generous thing – a proper armchair, a large rug, a single big pot with something growing in it – gives the room a scale to measure against, and the smaller things stop looking apologetic.

A very large framed mirror leaning against the plaster wall of a small apartment, far bigger than anything else in the room — A small apartment furnished entirely in small pieces looks like a model of a flat.

The rug is usually the easiest place to try this. Most apartments are living with a rug two sizes too small.

6. Stop the room at the ceiling

Small apartments often have a picture rail, a crown molding, or a change of plaster near the top of the wall. Painting the ceiling and the strip above the rail in the same color as the walls, rather than in white, removes a horizontal line and the wall reads taller. It takes an afternoon and a half liter of paint.

A corner of a small apartment where the wall color runs straight over the ceiling with no visible line where the wall ends — Rooms read as small when they are full of edges. This removes one of the biggest.

7. Store vertically, but only against one wall

Shelves to the ceiling work. Shelves to the ceiling on three walls make a storeroom. Choose the wall you look at least – usually the one the sofa or bed backs onto – and put the height there. The other walls stay flat.

Tall oak shelving packed with books and pots filling one wall of a small apartment while the adjoining walls stay smooth and empty — Height works, but only in one place. On three walls it becomes a storeroom.

8. Keep the floor one material

If the kitchen tile meets a laminate that meets a rug that meets a doormat, the eye counts four small areas instead of one floor. Where you cannot change the flooring, a single large rug that runs across a threshold does most of the same work.

A view through a small apartment in which one continuous oak floor runs through every space with no thresholds or change of material — Every change of floor material is a wall the eye has to cross.

9. Use the back of the door

Not for a shoe organizer. For the one thing that otherwise sits on a chair – the coat you actually wear, the bag you actually carry. A single hook on the back of a door removes the pile that forms on the nearest horizontal surface, which is the thing that makes a small apartment feel cluttered rather than small.

A slim row of oak pegs on the back of an apartment door holding a linen tote, a wool scarf and a coat — The one surface in a small apartment that nothing else wants.

10. Repeat one color three times

A small room does not have space for a palette. Pick one color that is not a neutral – the green of a plant pot, a rust in the rug, the blue of a book spine you like – and let it turn up three times, spread out. The room reads as deliberate. Two colors fighting reads as accumulation.

A small apartment in which one terracotta clay tone appears three times - a pot, a cushion and a bowl - spread far apart — Three times, spread apart. Everything else stays quiet.

11. Light in three low places, never overhead

The single ceiling bulb is what makes a small apartment feel like a rental. Three lamps at different heights, all below eye level, and the same bulb warmth in each. The corners get light, the ceiling stays dark, and the room’s edges become soft instead of obvious. A reading corner is a good excuse for the first of them.

A small apartment in the evening lit by a table lamp, a floor lamp and a shelf lamp, all warm, with the ceiling left dark — Three low lamps, one bulb warmth, nothing overhead. The edges of the room go soft.

12. Leave one wall alone

Completely. No shelf, no picture, no hook. It feels like waste for about a week and then it becomes the reason the apartment feels calm. Every small room needs somewhere for the eye to stop.

A long bare warm off-white plaster wall running the full width of a small apartment with nothing hung on it — Empty wall is not unfinished. In a small apartment it is the only place the eye gets to rest.

What We Would Not Bother With

Multi-function furniture that does two things badly. Nesting tables you never nest. Mirrors opposite windows, which mostly reflect the building across the street. Under-bed storage boxes on wheels, which become the place things go to be forgotten.

None of these are wrong exactly. They are just the things we bought, used for a month, and then worked around.

Questions We Get Asked

How do you decorate a small apartment without it feeling cluttered?

Decide what stays out before you decide what to buy. Most small apartments do not have a storage problem, they have a horizontal-surface problem – every flat surface collects, and the collection is what reads as clutter. Clear one surface completely and keep it that way, and the room can take more decoration than you would think.

Do light colors actually make a small room look bigger?

Not on their own. What makes a room feel larger is continuity – fewer edges, fewer changes of material, fewer horizontal lines across the walls. A small room painted a deep color top to bottom, with the ceiling included, often feels larger than a white room broken up by white baseboards, white rail and a white ceiling at a different tone.

What is the one change worth making first?

Curtains hung at ceiling height. It costs a rod and an hour, it changes the proportion of the whole room, and unlike paint or furniture you can undo it.

Is it worth buying furniture made for small spaces?

Usually not. Small-space furniture is small in every dimension, which means a room full of it has no scale and reads as a model of a room. One normal-sized piece and less of everything else works better. The exception is depth – a sofa six inches shallower than standard genuinely changes how you move through a room.

Where We Would Start

If you do one thing this week: clear a surface and leave it clear. If you do two: raise the curtains. Everything else on the list can wait for a weekend, and most of it you will find you no longer need once the room has somewhere to breathe.