Interior Design

If you're looking for bow decor ideas for fall this year, here's the useful part first: a single sculptural, matte-finish bow can work well as a seasonal accent on a shelf, a cushion, or a wall. That's a styling call based on how the shape fits the season's broader design mood, not a lab-tested result, but it holds up fine on its own.

Good historic apartment renovation ideas for a pre-1978 rental have to survive three separate tests before a single tool comes out: can the change be undone at move-out, does the landlord need to sign off, and does it disturb a painted surface old enough to contain lead. These are three different questions, not one blended judgment call.

Choosing cozy small kitchen paint colors comes down to a decision most people skip: where the color goes, not just which color it is. A light, warm neutral covering most of the kitchen keeps the room feeling open, while one deeper accent, placed on a single coherent surface rather than scattered around, adds depth without shrinking the space visually. Use the lighter color across the larger area, then reserve the deeper color for one clearly defined surface. This guide walks through picking...

Dark paint won't make a small kitchen measure a single square foot bigger. No pigment changes a floor plan. The real question isn't whether dark paint can make a small kitchen look bigger, since paint doesn't move walls; it's whether the room can stop feeling cramped and start feeling deliberate. That's what a careful application of dark paint colors for small kitchens can actually deliver: a look that reads as chosen on purpose, not defaulted into by whatever gallon was on sale.

A 540-square-foot rental in Los Angeles has tropical peel-and-stick wallpaper, checkerboard floors, black cabinets, and a mix of thrifted midcentury furniture packed into one bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen you could cross in four steps. By any reasonable color count, it should feel chaotic. Instead, interior designer William Hutton, who lives there with his partner Kevan, describes a home where "there are so many colors within our home, but it's not overpowering," he told Architectural...

A growing number of designers are recommending two layers of window treatment instead of one, and the reasoning has nothing to do with decorative flourish. New York interior designer Sarah Lederman describes the payoff as adding "depth and visual richness that a single layer might not achieve, without taking up additional square footage" (Architectural Digest, 2 weeks ago). The layered drapery trend, as designers are now describing it, adds nothing to the floor plan and quite a lot to how a...

Interior designers keep flagging the same three culprits behind a cheap-looking kitchen: visible clutter, flat lighting, and features that fight how the room actually works. Across the designer interviews reviewed for this piece, these three kitchen design mistakes that make your kitchen look cheap turn up again and again, and fixing them doesn't require gutting the room. Some of these cheap-looking kitchen mistakes cost nothing to correct. Others are worth a modest hire. None demand a full...

When architect Ed Lippmann renovated his son's Sydney apartment, he added zero square metres. Yet the unit now works like a two-story home, with a sleeping loft built directly above a wardrobe and desk.

A can of paint cannot fix cabinets that are falling apart. But on cabinets that are structurally sound, color does more design work in a kitchen than a wall ever will. Cabinetry is the one surface in a kitchen that behaves like a giant piece of furniture, not a backdrop, and that changes how you should think about how to paint kitchen cabinets before you open a single can.

Interior designer Jessa Myer calls the first week of August something close to sacred: mornings feel quieter, evenings finally cool enough to justify a lit candle or an open window, and yet nothing on the calendar has officially declared fall.

A supposed "viral" Drew Barrymore Walmart lamp has been described as a vintage-inspired design with paisley-patterned glass and fringe trim. Beautiful by Drew Barrymore does sell vintage-style lamps at Walmart, but the available evidence does not confirm that specific design or its supposed viral popularity.

A single large plant, positioned right, can do a version of what a wall does: mark where one zone ends and another begins. It won't match a wall's privacy or sound control, since a wall physically blocks both, and a large planter room divider only signals a boundary rather than sealing one. What it does avoid is the construction cost and permanence of a built partition.

Architect Graci Mills spent nearly two years living in her 50-foot Bed-Stuy railroad apartment before she renovated a single wall. She and her partner tested different room arrangements until, as she put it, they were "confident about how we wanted it to work."

Figuring out how to use extra space in your home almost always starts with an urge to buy something and put it there. Talk to enough designers, though, and a different instinct shows up again and again: decide what the space is for, and how people will move through it, before deciding what goes inside it. Skip that order and the wrong furniture choice doesn't just fail to help. It creates a second problem on top of the first: a blocked path, a chair no one can reach, a room that reads as...

This guide walks through a complete renter-friendly balcony makeover from bare concrete to functional outdoor room, using a sequence proven by two documented NYC transformations, both completed for under $2,000 without structural modifications to the building. The steps: assess constraints, cover the floor, solve lighting, add seating and privacy, then layer in plants. Most upgrades here are portable and non-structural. Fixed lighting or anything involving drilling is a different category, and...

Searches for "curved walls" and "arched doorways" are surging. That visible shift appears to be one symptom of a bigger change in how people think about what a home should do.

In late 2023, Architectural Digest documented something quietly revealing: contemporary designer rooms built around 200-year-old Central European furniture. Eight mismatched Biedermeier chairs reupholstered in colorful corduroy around a 1980s Paul Mayen table.

Painting oak kitchen cabinets blue can transform a dated kitchen without the expense and disruption of replacing sound cabinetry. The challenge is not applying the color. It is preparing the surface well enough for the finish to bond, cover evenly, and withstand daily use.

Forget bonnets. Forget covered wagons. Whatever's driving the renewed interest in pioneer-era interiors has nothing to do with reenactment, and everything to do with texture, patina, and rooms that feel lived-in rather than staged.

Most homeowners stare at their kitchen and ask whether it looks dated. That's the wrong question. Designers walk in and ask whether it works, and that shift in framing determines everything: what gets changed, how long the project takes, and how much it ends up costing. Knowing the signs your kitchen needs a renovation, versus signs it simply needs a refresh, is the difference between a smart investment and an expensive mistake.

The open-plan kitchen solved one problem and quietly created another. When the wall came down between the kitchen and the living space, everyday life moved into permanent view. The coffee station, the stand mixer, the Costco-sized paper towel rolls, the wine rack that was never quite organized all of it became part of the room's aesthetic, all the time.

Most expensive furniture mistakes happen before anyone sits on the couch or opens a drawer. They happen at the tape measure, the price tag, and the fine print. Knowing what to check before buying furniture, and doing it in the right order, catches problems while they're still cheap to fix, before delivery, not after.

How to arrange furniture in a small living room comes down to one governing rule: circulation and function decide the layout first, and style gets layered on after. That's the rule behind every choice in this guide, and it's the rule one New York renter learned the hard way, tape measure in hand.

Visual artist Charles Andre Thomas says a 1921 industrial building in Chicago won him over before he ever stepped inside the unit he'd end up renting. What he found was a raw, 3,000-square-foot shell: exposed brick, beams, overhead ductwork, oversized windows, and no walls dividing it into rooms. After an industrial loft rental makeover, that same open floor now works as his home, his painting studio, and a space that doubles as a showcase for finished work.

Choosing the first room to renovate can be difficult when the budget will not stretch to a kitchen or bathroom. An entryway offers a practical alternative: It is compact, used every day, and easy to update in stages.

Most small apartment design ideas to make a space feel bigger circle back to one claim: knock down walls, build in storage, watch the square footage stretch. The Towne House apartment, renovated by architects Brian Messana and Toby O'Rorke, is one of the projects from which the claim gets built. In the firm's own account of the job, storage became "the method by which the architectural space was defined."

Paint the same white on two walls in your house, and there's a decent chance you get two different colors. The paint didn't change; the light and the surroundings did, because white shifts with its environment more than most people expect, sliding from cream to gray depending on what's nearby. That's the puzzle behind how to choose the best white paint color for a room, and it's why this guide treats the decision as a sequence of checks rather than a shopping list.

A red lamp in a cream living room or a burgundy vase on a pale wood table can change where the eye settles. That simple effect is the basis of the unexpected red theory: one surprising red accent can make a room feel more considered.

A homeowner in the Kings Hill neighborhood lived for years with a bathroom remodeled once in the early 2000s. What finally got her moving wasn't a plan to preserve history. It was a shower leak that forced the issue, in a renovation documented last year by her contractor.

An IKEA paper lantern makeover doesn't call for advanced art skills. It calls for the REGOLIT paper shade, some paint, and one of three techniques from IKEA's own decorating project, per IKEA. IKEA frames the plain shade as a base for a "style update" that adds "a personal twist" to a room, per IKEA. If you're looking for how to customize an IKEA paper lantern, the choice comes down to full color, painted lines, or a repeat stamp motif.

There's a specific quality of light most people have experienced without ever quite naming it. Warm, low, distributed across a room from multiple sources rather than washing down from a single overhead fixture. You might have encountered it in a roadside inn, a period film, or the dim wood-paneled dining room of a chain restaurant working very hard to feel old. The candle sconce trend is, at its core, a consumer attempt to bring that quality of light home, and by late 2025, a single but telling...

The kids know to head to the appliance garage to pop a waffle in the toaster for breakfast. That detail, documented by Better Homes & Gardens earlier last year, is a better argument for good kitchen planning than any before-and-after photo. It means the room is organized clearly enough that children can navigate it on their own terms.

Kitchen renovations reliably spend money in the wrong order. Finishes, fixtures, and hardware get chosen first; layout gets treated as a given, the shape the room already is. But layout is the only decision that determines whether two people can cook at once, whether guests walk through the prep zone to reach the refrigerator, and whether there's a surface available when something hot needs to come off the stove. The other decisions affect how a kitchen looks. Layout determines whether it works.

The standard advice for small rooms has always been the same: keep it simple, keep it light, keep it sparse. Pattern drenching does the opposite, wrapping a room in a single motif across walls, ceiling, upholstery, and curtains. Designers are increasingly arguing it works better, and the pattern drenching wallpaper trend has pushed beyond powder rooms, with clients now open to papering living rooms and bedrooms too, according to designers surveyed by House Beautiful.

A pedestal sink or open vanity leaves everything underneath fully visible: the cleaning spray, the spare toilet paper rolls, the hair dryer cord that never made it back to a drawer. A bathroom sink skirt doesn't create new square footage. It makes that awkward open cavity usable rather than ignored.

A dining table can fit into many small apartments, but the tabletop is only part of the space it requires. You also need room for chairs, walking paths, open doors, and the furniture already in the room.

Studio-printed custom wallpaper averages around $6,500 per project, and a two-room installation runs closer to $10,000, according to Domino's profile of Nashville designer Mary Kathryn Wells and wallpaper studio New Hat.

The features homeowners most want to gut are usually the ones that matter most. Original floor plans get opened up for modern living, trim disappears during drywall work, windows get swapped out for energy efficiency. These aren't random casualties. The U.S. National Park Service identifies specific historic home architectural elements to preserve in its house-specific guidance: the interior spaces, materials, craftsmanship, and spatial relationships that together define a building's character....

This guide walks through four design principles color continuity, vertical emphasis, furniture scale, and light management that make any small room look bigger and feel genuinely larger. The principles apply across bedrooms, living rooms, home offices, and studios. Each section leads with the highest-impact move and explains the visual mechanism behind it.

Kitchen renovations force a difficult bet. You're committing a major investment to choices that are nearly impossible to undo, and design history is littered with kitchens that looked sharp in year one and exhausted by year five. Designers working in this space keep arriving at the same solution: the cashmere kitchen trend, which uses warm, softly pigmented neutrals, tactile natural materials, and restrained contrast to split the difference between sterile white and short-lived statement...