How-To Guides about Interior Design

Interior designers keep flagging the same three culprits behind a cheap-looking kitchen: visible clutter, flat lighting, and features that fight how the room actually works. Across the designer interviews reviewed for this piece, these three kitchen design mistakes that make your kitchen look cheap turn up again and again, and fixing them doesn't require gutting the room. Some of these cheap-looking kitchen mistakes cost nothing to correct. Others are worth a modest hire. None demand a full...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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 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...

Kitchens remain the room homeowners renovate more than any other, according to industry trackers Houzz and Fixr in Architectural Digest. Yet the same piece makes an uncomfortable argument: many of today's most popular upgrades chase showpiece appeal over daily usability. A lot of the signs your kitchen is outdated have nothing to do with skipping a trend and everything to do with a room that no longer matches how people actually live in it.

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.

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...

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.

An IKEA paper lantern makeover doesn't call for advanced art skills. It calls for the REGOLIT paper shade, some paint, and one of three techniques from IKEA's own decorating project, per IKEA. IKEA frames the plain shade as a base for a "style update" that adds "a personal twist" to a room, per IKEA. If you're looking for how to customize an IKEA paper lantern, the choice comes down to full color, painted lines, or a repeat stamp motif.

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.

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.

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.

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.

White paint doesn't make a room feel larger. It makes it bright. Architect Sarah Jacoby puts it plainly: "White doesn't make things bigger, it just makes it white." Designer Emily Frank of Frank & Co. Home goes further: "White reflects light, but brightness and spaciousness are not the same thing." Those are two different perceptual signals, and paint color addresses only one of them.

A midrange kitchen remodel now costs close to $78,000 nationally. An upscale version runs past $154,000, according to Remodeling Magazine's Cost vs. Value data cited by HGTV. Those figures don't include the 20% contingency buffer experts recommend setting aside for demolition surprises: water damage, code violations, the kinds of problems that don't show up until the walls come down. The timeline runs six to ten weeks on average, material costs have climbed 5–10% in recent years, and delivery...

A stained glass dining nook makeover solves a problem that paint and new cushions can't touch. The underlying issue with a dated nook isn't color or comfort it's that the space has no character built into its structure: flat light, no privacy, a corner that functions like a waiting room. Stained glass, the material most people associate with churches and Victorian vestibules, is appearing in ordinary residential kitchens and eating corners for exactly this reason.

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.

If you're figuring out how to choose a comfortable sofa for elderly parents, ignore the showroom first impression. The sofa that feels welcoming during a thirty-second test can become genuinely difficult to use after six months of daily sitting. The gap between "feels comfortable" and "works comfortably over time" comes down to three things you can verify in person: seat height under load, cushion firmness, and armrest usability.

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 small laundry room makeover ideas begin at the hardware store. This one began on graph paper. When DIYer Caitlyn Kalsek set out to overhaul her family's 35-square-foot utility room, she didn't touch a wall until she'd mapped every cabinet configuration on paper first. She called it "planning and playing cabinet Tetris."

Walk into a well-designed hotel room and something shifts. The space feels calm, considered, and expensive without being showy. Most people assume this is about the thread count or the furniture. A significant part of it is the paint.

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.

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.

Black paint can make a cheap piece look custom. It can also make every flaw louder. The difference between those two outcomes, when it comes to how to make furniture look expensive with black paint, comes down to four decisions: shade, sheen, surface preparation, and application restraint. Get all four right and a thrift-store dresser reads like a boutique purchase. Miss one and the same piece looks like it was painted in a garage on a Sunday afternoon.

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.

The kitchens that photograph well in renovation features tend to look like someone started from scratch. Most of them didn't. When Jessica and Matt Preteroti set out to refresh their early-2000s kitchen, the starting point wasn't a gut job. It was a clear-eyed read of what was worth keeping. "The cabinets were in fantastic condition, and there was a ton of storage, but nothing about the space really 'wowed,'" Jessica said. "It was an awesome space to cook: large spans of countertop, two ovens,...

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.

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....