Interior Design: Page 2

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...

Most rental apartments feel temporary because renters often start with the wrong upgrades. A rental starts to feel more personal when the first changes add visual impact, move with you, or come off cleanly before move-out.

The formal dining room is one of the most consistently underused spaces in smaller homes. Mika Ottman, a DIY and home design creator, had one in her century-old condo that came with the standard contents: a dining table, chairs, a console, and very little else. The room didn't fit how she actually lived. Her fix was to give it daily jobs rather than occasional ones, and the result is one of the more instructive murphy bed dining room ideas to surface this year.

Shiny brass no longer suits the kitchens most people actually have. That's the practical problem driving a shift in what designers are specifying, and it's worth understanding before you spend anything on new hardware.

For years, cool gray, builder-grade greige, and flat beige felt like rational paint choices — not because they looked especially interesting, but because they felt safe. They photographed cleanly, worked with common finishes, and seemed unlikely to hurt resale value.

The most effective bathroom upgrade decision isn't which tiles to choose or which vanity to order. It's deciding not to touch any of that at all. A small bathroom can look dramatically different, fresh and intentional, for roughly $300 in core materials, or closer to $800 once accessories and hardware fill in the gaps. This guide walks through the three moves that produce that result and the categories that will burn your budget if you let them in.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

The appeal of a sofa with a chaise is legitimate. You want somewhere to stretch out, a place to decompress at the end of the day with your feet up and the television on. Nobody is questioning the desire. The problem is that better chaise sofa alternatives rarely get a fair hearing at the point of sale, because the showroom floor flatters the format. What it cannot simulate is your actual apartment, your next apartment, or the dinner party where the chaise turns into an obstacle rather than an...

Crouch at your bedroom doorway and look at how much floor you can see beneath your furniture. If the answer is none, that's where this guide starts. Not with paint, not with a renovation. The fix is simpler: expose more floor, and the room's perceived size shifts with it.

Most balcony makeover guides assume you're starting with a rectangle. Nikki's balcony wasn't one. The entry door opened between two unequal sections, leaving one side narrow enough that most of her neighbors had written it off as unusable, according to Apartment Therapy. That's the problem this guide is built around: a split layout that functions as two unusable halves rather than one outdoor space. A small balcony makeover with IKEA outdoor tiles is what eventually changed that, but the tiles...

A structurally sound thrift store basket, properly cleaned and finished in a matte neutral, can sit on a shelf next to things that cost ten times more and hold its own. This guide walks through selecting, cleaning, repairing, and painting a thrifted wicker basket from start to finish. The hands-on work spans a few hours across two days. The full timeline is closer to a week, because prep and cure time aren't optional.

Most TV wall makeovers fail before the first coat of paint goes up. The homeowner picked the wrong fix. A flat, boring wall and a disproportionate wall with weak architectural presence look similar in photos, but they need completely different solutions. A DIY picture frame molding feature wall on a smooth, well-proportioned surface is overkill. Paint on a scale problem won't restore balance. The right upgrade depends entirely on what's actually wrong with the wall.

Victorian homes were built for accumulation. The carved woodwork, plaster cornicing, stained glass transoms, and elaborate ceiling moldings that define these houses were never meant to sit quietly in the background. They are the background, each room a layered argument about craftsmanship, material weight, and the social standing of whoever lived there.

The rooms getting serious attention in 2026 are not the ones with white walls and concealed storage. They are layered with handmade ceramics, regional textile motifs, inherited objects, and symbolic pattern. Spaces that look like they accumulated meaning over decades rather than arrived complete from a single retailer.

The most important decision in any historic farmhouse renovation happens before a single tile is ordered or a paint color chosen. It's the decision about what not to change. Get that list wrong and the rest, however beautiful, will feel like a costume on someone else's body.

A dorm room has to function as a bedroom, study area, storage space, and shared living area—all within a limited footprint. Decorating without first checking the room's dimensions and housing rules can lead to duplicate purchases, damaged walls, blocked walkways, and storage that does not fit.

Chartreuse, the yellow-green that sits somewhere between a fresh tennis ball and a ripe lime, is one of those colors that designers either champion loudly or refuse outright. Yet here it is again in 2026, showing up at design markets worldwide, landing in Pinterest's boldest color palette for the year, and sitting at the center of Sherwin-Williams' annual campaign to spotlight its least tinted shade. Decorating with chartreuse has attracted coordinated attention from fashion runways, interiors...

Most kitchens have at least one dead corner: a stretch of wall, an awkward alcove, a spot that accumulates mail, backpacks, and good intentions. The appeal of cozy breakfast nook ideas starts here, in the recognition that this space is already doing nothing useful.

Something has shifted in how homeowners think about walls. For years, an open floor plan was the default answer to what buyers wanted: knock down the barrier between kitchen and living room, add an island, call it finished. Now designers describe a different request landing in their inboxes, one driving the closed-concept layout trend: put some of those walls back.

Interior designers who spoke with Architectural Digest and The Spruce keep flagging the same handful of errors in client bedrooms, and one habit sits behind several of them: treating "calm" as a synonym for "empty."

A Los Angeles renter transformed her rental kitchen, by her own description, a standard "landlord special" of white-on-white cabinets, a warped shelf, and blinds that blocked the cabinets from opening fully, for $325 in paint, peel-and-stick tile, and hardware swaps.

Content creator Lynzi Judish turned her refrigerator into a Hobbit hole, complete with doilies, moss, and mushroom-shaped jars. In 2024, Eater reported that she was already planning her next project: a Charles Dickens-themed Christmas fridge, drawn from her love of classic literature.

Terracotta started showing up everywhere at once. Not as an accent wall in a rental apartment, but as the primary structural color in residential projects by designers who don't follow trends they set them. That shift, visible across project portfolios and trade press features over the past two years, is the clearest signal that something real is happening in interior design. Not a trend cycle completing itself on schedule, but a correction.

Setting up a rental kids room means solving two problems at once: keeping the space safe without drilling into walls, and making it actually work as a place a child wants to be. This guide covers both. By the end, you'll have a clear plan for layout, storage, decor, and hazard control in a rental bedroom whether that's a small dedicated room, a shared bedroom, or a nursery corner carved out of a one-bedroom apartment.

Budget curtains read as cheap for specific, fixable reasons. By the end of this guide, you'll know how to make curtains look expensive using the same structural logic designers apply to every install: hang height, rod width, fabric fullness, and hem weight. Four decisions. Miss any one and even quality fabric can look like an afterthought.

A gilded picture frame mounted around a wall intercom does something small and surprisingly effective: it turns an object everyone grimaces at into something guests actually comment on. Not because it hides the intercom it doesn't but because it gives the device a visual context that reads as chosen rather than inherited. That distinction is also what keeps this project safe and lease-legal.

Most elevated open shelving ideas start with the same problem they're trying to solve: put things on display, and eventually everything ends up on display. This guide covers one specific alternative that sidesteps that trap entirely. By the end, you'll know whether a narrow backsplash ledge shelf makes sense for your kitchen, how to spec it correctly, and what it realistically costs to build.

The best flower arrangement on a thrift store budget isn't sitting in the vase aisle at a home goods store. It's in a bin at an estate sale, shaped like a 19th-century oil lamp, and it costs about as much as a parking meter. This guide walks through two ways to make a DIY floral arrangement with a lamp: a reversible oil lamp tabletop vase that takes just a few minutes and requires no tools, and a vintage lampshade flower crown that hangs from the ceiling and stops a room cold. By the end,...

Most shelves waste vertical space above shorter books. It happens automatically: one tall hardcover sets the shelf height for an entire row, and every paperback beside it gains a column of dead air that serves no one. Across four or five shelf levels, that wasted clearance can add up to meaningful capacity and on well-spaced shelves with a mixed-height collection, this method can come close to doubling usable space. On shelves that are already loosely configured, the gain will be smaller....

A 270-square-foot studio in Kyiv now has a bedroom. Not a sleeping area cordoned off by a curtain, not a bed wedged into a corner a genuine sleeping zone separated from the living space by a glass partition that preserved the apartment's light while creating a boundary that didn't exist before (Dezeen, July 2024). That project makes the central point as plainly as anything: the difference between a studio and a one-bedroom is often just a well-placed divider.

Michael Pybus is a self-employed artist with a tight budget and a sharp eye. When a 100-year-old UK townhouse appeared at a reduced price while he was refreshing listings, he called immediately, viewed it, and put in an offer that was accepted on the spot, as Apartment Therapy reported this week. These colorful townhouse decorating ideas come from what he did next: spending one year redecorating every room himself, filling 710 square feet with saturated color, a patterned flower floor, and an...