Interior Design

Before picking a paint color or ordering a new sofa, check whether your living room's layout actually works.

Before you buy a platform frame, hang a divider, or commit to putting your bed in the middle of a studio apartment, you can test whether the layout will actually work using painter's tape, a few cardboard boxes, and about nine days total.

Ask several interior designers what's shaping window treatment trends in 2026, and there's no single answer. Six distinct styles keep coming up, and the real decision for homeowners isn't which one is trending hardest.

Before you call a contractor, separate the heat pump installation cost into two buckets: the work required for a safe, properly sized system, and the features that are optional. That distinction, more than any single number, determines whether you overpay.

A standard dorm room ships with a bed, a desk, a chair, and a dresser, in a space Wirecutter describes as dated and cramped. Campus housing offices know that gap exists, which is why they frame that same room as a student's home for the year and encourage decorating it to reflect personal style. This guide walks through cozy college dorm room decor ideas built around what your specific hall actually allows, not generic tips that assume every building has the same rules.

A shopper's TikTok cataloging every print in Dollar Tree's stained glass window film lineup pulled more than 300,000 views last week, and a second video showed the same film turning a plain window into a stained-glass look (Charlotte Observer reports). Dollar Tree sells the film for $1.25, and that price is doing a lot of the convincing.

A designer dresser priced above $35,000 was out of Kim's budget, so she used it as a reference instead of a shopping list. Her IKEA MALM dresser makeover with peel-and-stick tile came in at a reported $335, according to Apartment Therapy.

If your living room feels off but you can't quite name why, the fix probably isn't a shopping trip. Designers interviewed by The Spruce point to visual clutter, poor scale, and awkward layouts as common reasons a living room feels cluttered, cramped, or visually off, and editing what you already own is the fix they recommend before buying anything new.

The practical fix for decorating with avocado green right now is to stop treating it like a bold statement color and start treating it like an earthy neutral. That's the direct advice from designer Alison River, who tells readers to think of the shade "instead of a statement color" when planning a room. Pair it with the right modern materials, and you can acknowledge the 1970s avocado green comeback without recreating a period room.

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.

Kristen's bathroom, tucked into a 700-square-foot Manhattan studio, was cramped and finished in black tile. Building regulations meant she couldn't change the location of the plumbing, so shifting the shower or moving the sink wasn't an option; the renovation focused on finishes rather than reconfiguring fixtures.

Most homeowners staring down a gloomy room reach for the same fix: paint everything white. It seems logical, but Sherwin-Williams' own color guidance warns against it, noting that an overly bright white can make a space feel sterile rather than inviting, especially in kitchens. Figuring out how to brighten a dark room starts with a question most people skip: brighter, how exactly?

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.

A 1930s Dutch house renovation in Sliedrecht, South Holland, shows what happens when a couple stops treating a dark, cramped terrace house as a paint problem and starts treating it as a layout problem. This project suggests that paint alone would not have solved Rianne and Gerard van Heteren's main issue: a narrow ground floor with poor flow and limited daylight, House Beautiful reports. Their fixes offer a useful framework for homeowners working through a similar problem, though it's worth...

This guide walks you through how to install plywood window trim that reads as intentional finish carpentry selection, fabrication, installation, and finishing, in that order. Follow the same process on every window in the house, and the cumulative effect is the actual upgrade: rooms stop looking assembled piecemeal and start reading as a considered interior.

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."

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Building a bookshelf room divider behind bed means solving one problem before any other: getting real separation from the rest of the room without blocking every scrap of light that reaches it. Designer Lizzie Gill ran into exactly that problem when she renovated a dilapidated Connecticut barn into a studio and guest space. "I wanted to build a room divider that hid the headboard of the bed, but also allowed light through," she told Architectural Digest five years ago.

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.

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."

For years, the formal living room occupied an awkward place in many homes: carefully furnished, rarely used, and often treated more like a showroom than part of everyday life. As households began favoring open floor plans and more casual ways of entertaining, these rooms seemed increasingly unnecessary.

Picture the room: a sofa faces a wall-mounted TV, the coffee table sits dead center, and the whole arrangement looks perfectly reasonable in photos. Then someone tries to walk from the front door to the kitchen without knocking a knee on the ottoman, and two people trying to have a conversation realize they're both staring at a screen instead of each other. That's not a decorating failure. It's a planning failure, and it's the thread running through nearly every one of the living room layout...

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.

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.

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.

Joanna Gaines is previewing a fall home collection built around a muted, vintage-inspired blue she calls "a neutral," paired with warm brown accents to make the color read as distinctly autumn.

Thrifted under-bed storage ideas usually start the same way: a handled basket from a thrift store, the handles cut off, and a plan to slide it under the bed. Handled baskets run 50 cents to $1 secondhand, compared with $9 to $19 for a similar rectangular basket at retailers like Target or HomeGoods (In My Own Style, last month). That price gap is real. The under-bed part of the plan runs into trouble fast.

Amazon is listing a foldable, glass-walled container-style shop marketed for commercial use, one that unfolds into roughly 400 square feet of space with a rooftop deck, priced at $44,569. This Amazon prefab coffee shop, sold as the Modern Glass Storefront Container Shop, sits inside a wider Amazon prefab category running from around $13,000 to nearly $50,000, according to The Call Of, which covered the listing earlier this summer.

A $3,000 budget kitchen makeover with painted green cabinets works if that money funds one project done well: a DIY cabinet repaint, new hardware, and a couple of finishing touches. It doesn't stretch to professional labor, brand-new doors, and a full room overhaul on top of that. Before buying anything, price your own version of this plan. Count your doors and drawer fronts, pick a paint system, and check local hardware costs, since those three numbers decide whether $3,000 actually covers...

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...

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.

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 room feels lived-in for two reasons people tend to blur together, and learning how to make a home feel lived-in starts with telling them apart. One is patina: the physical way surfaces change from light, touch, and time.

A small light fixture in a large room reads as "apologetic," even when every sofa, rug, and side table in that room was chosen with care, according to Nikki Levy Interiors earlier this year. That mismatch is usually what's behind the nagging sense that a living room looks expensive but doesn't quite feel finished.