News and Updates about Interior Design

Most small apartment design ideas to make a space feel bigger circle back to one claim: knock down walls, build in storage, watch the square footage stretch. The Towne House apartment, renovated by architects Brian Messana and Toby O'Rorke, is one of the projects from which the claim gets built. In the firm's own account of the job, storage became "the method by which the architectural space was defined."

Benjamin Moore named Webster Green (HC-130) its 2027 Color of the Year, selecting an established shade from its Historical Color Collection rather than introducing a new formula. The Benjamin Moore 2027 Color of the Year Webster Green pick leans on an archival formula, not a fresh one, a choice the brand ties directly to how people are shopping for color right now.

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.

Most homeowners stare at their kitchen and ask whether it looks dated. That's the wrong question. Designers walk in and ask whether it works, and that shift in framing determines everything: what gets changed, how long the project takes, and how much it ends up costing. Knowing the signs your kitchen needs a renovation, versus signs it simply needs a refresh, is the difference between a smart investment and an expensive mistake.

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.

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 supposed "viral" Drew Barrymore Walmart lamp has been described as a vintage-inspired design with paisley-patterned glass and fringe trim. Beautiful by Drew Barrymore does sell vintage-style lamps at Walmart, but the available evidence does not confirm that specific design or its supposed viral popularity.

IKEA's US site lists the PS 2026 side table in dark red at $39.99. Designed by David Wahl under item number 806.210.67, the foldable table is built to add surface space quickly and fold away when it isn't needed.

Choosing the first room to renovate can be difficult when the budget will not stretch to a kitchen or bathroom. An entryway offers a practical alternative: It is compact, used every day, and easy to update in stages.

A guest room that mostly sits empty between visits can still handle daily work without giving up the bed. A DIY bookshelf with fold-down desk, sometimes described as a wall-mounted fold-down desk with shelves, gives that room a second job: a hinged desktop drops down from a wall-mounted shelf unit when work needs to happen, then folds up into the stored position when it doesn't. The whole assembly anchors into wall studs instead of standing on the floor, which is why this counts as an...

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

Most cozy reading nook ideas come down to the same four things: an unused corner, a comfortable chair, good light, and a place to set down a book. BookTok's latest home trend, the "personal reading retreat," is built around exactly that setup, and the practical advice behind it works whether or not the trend name sticks. Building one doesn't take a spare room, a big budget, or a hashtag.

Before you call a contractor, separate the heat pump installation cost into two buckets: the work required for a safe, properly sized system, and the features that are optional. That distinction, more than any single number, determines whether you overpay.

Building a screen-free room doesn't require gutting a space or buying a stack of new furniture. The best analog room design ideas come down to three decisions: pick one offline activity you'll actually return to, decide what happens to the nearest screen, and arrange seating, lighting, and supplies around that single activity. Start with a corner if a full renovation isn't in the cards; converting an entire room into a dedicated retreat is a bigger project, covered further down.

The IKEA Konstrunda collection began rolling out globally on September 1, 2026, bringing 22 art objects from seven creators to stores and online. Some regional schedules differ, including Norway's, where the in-store launch starts nine days later.

Joanna Gaines is previewing a fall home collection built around a muted, vintage-inspired blue she calls "a neutral," paired with warm brown accents to make the color read as distinctly autumn.

A growing number of designers are recommending two layers of window treatment instead of one, and the reasoning has nothing to do with decorative flourish. New York interior designer Sarah Lederman describes the payoff as adding "depth and visual richness that a single layer might not achieve, without taking up additional square footage" (Architectural Digest, 2 weeks ago). The layered drapery trend, as designers are now describing it, adds nothing to the floor plan and quite a lot to how a...

Good historic apartment renovation ideas for a pre-1978 rental have to survive three separate tests before a single tool comes out: can the change be undone at move-out, does the landlord need to sign off, and does it disturb a painted surface old enough to contain lead. These are three different questions, not one blended judgment call.

A room feels lived-in for two reasons people tend to blur together, and learning how to make a home feel lived-in starts with telling them apart. One is patina: the physical way surfaces change from light, touch, and time.

A small light fixture in a large room reads as "apologetic," even when every sofa, rug, and side table in that room was chosen with care, according to Nikki Levy Interiors earlier this year. That mismatch is usually what's behind the nagging sense that a living room looks expensive but doesn't quite feel finished.

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...

Three rooms knocked into one. Sightlines clear to the garden. A six-year-old's playroom tucked below the main suite, picture window framing the lawn. The calm in this Hertfordshire home documented by House Beautiful isn't something Lucy and Dan maintain every morning. It was engineered in before the furniture arrived.

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 red pendant light hanging in an otherwise white or greige bedroom does something specific: it makes the room feel finished. Not busy. Not loud. Finished. That outcome has a name now: the unexpected red theory. And while it originated on TikTok, the mechanism behind it is considerably older than social media.

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....

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...

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.

Gray is not the problem. Worth stating clearly, because the current design conversation can make it sound otherwise. What multiple designers have identified across several publications over the past year is a more specific failure mode: cool gray applied to every surface without much thought walls, trim, cabinetry, floors as a safe default rather than a deliberate choice. That version of gray stopped feeling calm and started feeling empty.

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...

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.

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...

The version of shine-maxxing circulating on social media entire rooms wrapped in rainbow-slicked surfaces, every wall shifting and gleaming is not what professional designers are actually specifying. What they're doing is quieter and more considered: one iridescent feature wall in a powder room that moves from pale gold to violet as afternoon light crosses it, or a single pearlescent tile niche set behind a freestanding tub.

Designers aren't declaring war on upper cabinets. They're being more selective about where those cabinets actually earn their spot on the wall, and that shift is showing up across multiple 2026 design analyses (Homedit, earlier this year). The debate over kitchens without upper cabinets keeps getting framed as a binary: cabinets in, or cabinets out. That framing misses what's actually happening.

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.