How-To Guides about Interior Design

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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...

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.

Indoor treillage ideas usually come down to one practical decision: do you want the garden-lattice pattern printed flat on the wall, or do you want a real grid standing off the surface and casting shadows as the light changes?

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.

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.

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...

Most guest bedrooms fail the same way: they look fine but sleep badly. Wellness-focused hotel operators have found evidence-based design strategies associated with sleep-quality improvements of around 30–35% in guest surveys, driven by targeted changes to bedding, light, and room environment not to decor (Design for Travel reported earlier this year). Knowing how to make a guest bedroom feel like a hotel, it turns out, is less about aesthetics and more about removing friction.

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.

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.