Trending about Interior Design

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

A sheer curtain looks like the simplest window treatment there is: hang it, let daylight in, done. But the modern sheer curtain ideas turning up in design coverage this year treat that panel as half a system, the daytime component of a two-part setup that also includes drapery, a Roman shade, or a blind, chosen for what the room needs once the sun goes down.

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...

Most homeowners start a yard project with a plant list, a saved photo, or a strong opinion about hydrangeas. Landscape designers start somewhere else entirely: with water, dirt, and buried pipes.

A kitchen that looks dated isn't automatically a kitchen that's losing you money. Before spending a dollar, separate style from function: measure your clearances and storage, inspect finishes for actual damage, and check what comparable homes in your area recently sold for. Among the dated kitchen trends that hurt home value, only the ones that show up as a real, confirmed problem in that check are worth fixing.

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

This guide walks through how to create zones in a studio apartment: taping out a layout for sleeping, cooking, working, and living or dining, then pressure-testing it with your actual furniture before you buy or mount anything. It's a measuring and furniture-testing method, not a demolition project. No walls come down, and none go up, in your apartment.

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.

Before testing any English cottage Craftsman kitchen ideas against a real house, the premise needs a correction. The Squirrel Hill house at the center of this piece wasn't dressed up in cottage clothing during its remodel. Architect Mindy O'Connor describes it as having "a strong Tudor personality, with a cottage feel and some Craftsman elements" from the start. The cottage character predates the renovation. It wasn't manufactured by it.

This guide walks through two connected builds: a mobile 2x4 frame on locking casters, then a sanded, food-safe butcher-block top mounted on top of it. Together they make a DIY kitchen island cart along the lines of the one detailed in EngineerSkill.blog's build guide, published four months ago: a dedicated prep surface with a slatted storage shelf underneath, sized here to roughly 45 by 21 by 36 inches as a working example. It's a budget-friendly way to build a mobile kitchen island with a...

Picking a color for a rental is the easy part. The harder question is whether your lease and your actual wall can survive the method you want to use to get that color up. A shade you love can still cost part of your deposit if it goes on the wrong surface the wrong way, which is why renter-friendly color ideas have to start with the wall, not the swatch.

This guide covers planning, building, and finishing an IKEA BILLY office built-in makeover, the kind that reads like custom cabinetry instead of a row of flat-pack bookcases pushed against a wall. Four decisions largely determine whether it works: layout planning, base construction, wall anchoring, and trim work. This guide sticks to the bookcase-and-cabinet wall itself: the shelving, cabinets, base, and trim. It doesn't cover building a matching desk, since a built-in desk is its own carpentry...

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.