How-To Guides about Interior Design

Philadelphia renter Madeline Warshaw inherited a bathroom with a pedestal sink, a sealed "mystery door" leading nowhere, and storage that amounted to one medicine cabinet mirror. Her fix was an eight-drawer IKEA HAUGA dresser placed directly over that dead door, an IKEA dresser bathroom storage hack she calls the biggest change in the room. She says it gave her more bathroom counter space and storage than she'd ever had in that spot, according to Apartment Therapy.

A mantel vignette with one sculptural bottle, a dried stem and deliberate off-center placement can look pulled from a design book without starting on a store shelf or a saved Pinterest board.

A saturated plum or deep navy can turn a cramped, builder-grade bathroom into a space that reads as considered and finished, closer to a boutique hotel bath than the room you've been avoiding. Color is only one part of the formula. Knowing how to use dark paint in a small bathroom means deciding your finish and your lighting at the same time as your color, not after the walls are already dry.

A 176-square-foot studio with a 10-foot ceiling can read as open and airy, or it can feel like a storage closet with good lighting. The difference comes down to three choices: where the bed sits relative to the front door, whether there's one flexible surface instead of two single-purpose ones, and which wall gets stuck with the tall furniture. This guide walks through those choices in order, using an 11-by-16-foot studio with a 10-foot ceiling as a running example, so anyone working out how to...

Before choosing colors or counting pillows, fix the one thing that makes the biggest visual difference: the insert. Several designers interviewed by House Beautiful size their inserts one to two inches larger than the pillow cover, since an insert that matches the cover's exact dimensions tends to look flat the moment someone leans against it. Wally's Hardware recommends the same approach for a plush, finished look. Getting that right is the first real lesson in how to style throw pillows, and...

A narrow strip of wall by the front door can hold more than a coat hook and a shoe pile. This guide walks through checking whether your entryway wall can safely support a mounted wardrobe system, figuring out exactly what it needs to hold, and installing modular rails, shelves, and baskets so the space functions as clothing storage instead of a permanent pile-up by the door.

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.

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.

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...

Before spending a dollar on galley kitchen ideas, answer one question: is this a clearance problem or a styling problem? They call for different fixes, and treating a clearance problem like a styling problem is why so many galley remodels stall out or feel worse once the money's spent. If you can't open the dishwasher and the refrigerator door at the same time, no paint color or pendant light is going to solve that.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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."

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 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 cramped bathroom with no floor space for another cabinet can still gain useful storage. One option is to build a shallow shelf or cabinet into an existing wall cavity rather than adding furniture that projects into the room.

A 250-square-foot studio has room to look intentional, not just efficient, but only if the layout comes together in the right order. The most reliable approach to 250-square-foot apartment design ideas starts with the room's fixed geometry, not a color palette or a storage cart. This guide walks through measuring the room's fixed dimensions, choosing one full-size piece to build around, taping out the plan on the floor, and protecting circulation before any paint chip or storage bin gets picked.

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.

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...

Most studio apartment hacks to make it feel bigger fail for one reason: people try all of them at once, in no particular order, until the room is crowded with fixes instead of furniture. This guide runs in priority order instead. Run a 10-minute room assessment, protect the one walking path used every day, then work through 12 fixes only as far as the specific problem requires.

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.

Picking a cabinet color feels overwhelming until you stop hunting for one "perfect" shade and treat it as a four-step process instead. This guide walks through choosing the best kitchen cabinet paint colors for every design style by working through what's already fixed in your kitchen, then style, then contrast, then light, in that order, so you land on a color you're not scrambling to redo next year.

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.

Sasha Faiz's bedroom makeover gets attention for the pink walls first, but the bolder move is the headboard: a wave-shaped panel spanning the full width of the wall, described as combining side tables and sconces built directly into it, for a project she calls a $600 DIY. "I am not a carpenter … but knew I wouldn't be able to find this shape in stores so went on the mission of making it myself," she says of the piece on Apartment Therapy.

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...

A kitchen with more than 50 years of nicotine-stained white cabinets doesn't sound like an obvious candidate for a dramatic redo, but paint transformed one into a bright green-and-coral space for a surprisingly small cabinet budget.

Most furniture shoppers only solve half the fit problem. They check whether a piece will look right in the room, but not whether it can physically get there or be lived with once it's in place. That gap is a frequent cause of avoidable returns and layout problems, and it sits behind most of the furniture shopping mistakes to avoid before you place an order.

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 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.

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.

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...

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...