Small Apartment Design Ideas to Make a Space Feel Bigger

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."

The documented footprint is 530 square feet, worth stating plainly because at that size a few reclaimed feet of hallway or an extra cabinet depth genuinely changes how a room functions.

What the firm built breaks into three pieces: an oddly shaped foyer rebuilt as a square volume with lacquered panels, a kitchen expanded into a former broom closet, and a teak divider holding storage and electronics that the architects call the "nexus" between the apartment's three functional zones.

This is the firm's own project description, reliable on materials, dimensions, and stated intent, though not an independent account of how the apartment performs day to day. The rest of this piece treats those three interventions as separate decisions worth examining individually, then turns to two other small renovations that solve overlapping problems with different tools: concealing entry and utility clutter, and separating a sleeping zone without a wall.

The foyer, the kitchen, and the divider solve three separate problems

The apartment's built elements aren't one storage-replaces-walls trick repeated three times. They're three distinct architectural moves, and treating them separately shows what each actually does.

Start with the foyer. It began as, in the architects' words, "a strangely long and wide entry foyer" extending from the living room. They rebuilt it as a square volume with white lacquered panels and doors, creating a narrower passageway to the main living space, and that reconfiguration opened up area for deep closets and a home office carved from the original coat closet.

The kitchen took a different path. Adjacent to the foyer, it was extended into a broom closet and refitted with Ashe-wood and stainless cabinetry, with appliances tucked under the counter. Where the foyer swapped one volume for another, the kitchen simply absorbed a utility space into its working footprint.

The teak room divider is a third kind of move. It holds storage and electronic equipment while serving as the connective point between the apartment's three zones, with foldaway doors that let occupants watch television from either the living room or the bedroom. A sliding acid-etched glass panel built into the same cabinet converts it from open connector to closed partition on demand, a flexibility neither the foyer nor the kitchen shares.

Reshaping a passage, absorbing a utility space, and building a flexible connector call for different design decisions. Collapsing them into a single "storage instead of walls" idea flattens what the project actually shows.

Continuous surfaces and lighting: a distinct move from zone organization

Organizing zones is one problem. Keeping the result from reading as boxed-in rooms is another, and the documented finishes at Towne House address that second problem specifically.

A new oak floor, stained dark chocolate, runs as a continuous plane through the residence and into the shower room, whose walls are tiled separately in Carrara marble mini-brick. The floor material doesn't stop at that threshold the way it would in a conventionally partitioned layout. The ceiling mirrors that move: it forms a matching continuous plane floating over the teak divider, washed with up-lighting from below, so the divider reads as furniture sitting under an unbroken ceiling rather than a wall interrupting it.

The teak cabinet itself floats above the floor with its own under-lighting, and a separate white lacquer windowsill cabinet, in the firm's words, further enhances "the perception of unlimited space." That distinction, between organizing function and dissolving the visual seams between zones, still leaves a separate problem untouched: where the actual clutter goes once the zones are set.

Built-in storage for small apartments, and a plan that reshapes the walls instead

Two other small renovations tackle that clutter problem with different scopes, sharpening what's specific to Towne House and what recurs across small-space design more broadly.

In a 500-square-foot East Village studio renovated by the architecture firm Le Whit, a full-height entry closet creates what the firm calls a subtle foyer, giving a sense of arrival before the space opens into the living and dining area.

It's a similar function to the Towne House foyer, achieved with a single built cabinet for shoes, coats, and bags rather than reconstructing the passage itself. A matching full-height cabinet conceals a washer and dryer, an amenity the architects describe as essential in a fifth-floor walk-up, and the remaining kitchen appliances sit behind plywood fronts, letting the kitchen "read as a cohesive piece of furniture rather than a collection of individual appliances." It's built-in storage for small apartments doing the same concealment work as the Towne House kitchen, without reshaping the room itself.

A 34-square-metre apartment in Warsaw's Port Praski district, designed by Polish designer Dawid Konieczny, takes a related idea in a different direction. Rather than adding a storage volume to an existing rectilinear plan, Konieczny rebuilt the apartment's geometry itself, replacing straight partitions with curved walls and bespoke joinery throughout.

Konieczny told Dezeen the project was guided by wanting "to demonstrate how much sense of space and airiness can be achieved through thoughtful functional planning," and the existing layout was torn out and rebuilt rather than patched around.

Nothing in the documentation describes a discrete storage strategy layered on top of the Warsaw plan the way East Village's closets are. What creates room there is a change in the walls themselves: joinery and structure become one continuous curved surface instead of a straight partition with cabinets bolted onto it. For anyone weighing studio apartment layout ideas, that's a genuinely different lever than concealment millwork, changing the shape of the room rather than just what's hidden inside it.

The trade-off is worth naming plainly. Towne House and East Village both add built cabinetry to an existing rectilinear plan to regulate what's visible and where people can go. Warsaw goes further, rebuilding the walls so joinery and structure share a single curved surface.

Neither is inherently better: a renovation that has to preserve existing partitions has no access to Warsaw's approach, and a full gut renovation with room in the budget for structural work may get more perceived space from reshaping walls than any amount of concealment cabinetry could deliver.

Both approaches, though, share one limitation. Neither replaces the need for somewhere to sleep. A bed still has to occupy real floor space, and that's the one element left standing once the clutter disappears.

Two ways to raise a bed, and what each one actually adds

At Towne House, the bed rests on a custom Ashe-wood platform that forms a bedside shelf on each side, with no storage compartment documented underneath. Curtained, floor-to-ceiling clear glass, not a wall, separates that platform from the bathroom; open, it lets the shower borrow city views, and drawing the curtain turns the glass back into a privacy screen. The platform's job is spatial and optical: a shelf and a boundary the eye registers, not one the body has to navigate around.

The East Village platform does something else. Le Whit's own description says the raised bedroom platform was built "to establish a clear distinction" between the living and sleeping areas, with generous built-in storage concealed below it. That platform does double duty, floor-level storage infrastructure and a visual break between zones, rather than a shelf plus a sightline.

Both platforms stop short of an actual wall, but they answer different needs. Towne House's adds surface area and a boundary the eye reads; East Village's adds cubic feet of storage and a firmer sense of arrival at the sleeping zone. A platform bed with storage for a studio apartment isn't one universal move. It's a choice about whether the floor beneath the mattress needs to hold anything besides the mattress.

Small apartment design ideas to make a space feel bigger: start with circulation

The project points to three narrower conclusions than "storage instead of walls." At Towne House, the foyer, kitchen, and divider each solve a distinct problem: one manages arrival and storage, one enlarges the kitchen's working footprint, and one connects or separates rooms as needed.

The apartment's continuous oak flooring, floating ceiling plane, and underlighting form a separate layer on top of that, keeping the zones from reading as boxed-in rather than doing the organizing work itself. And East Village and Warsaw reach the same underlying goal, making a small footprint feel larger, through smaller-scope millwork in one case and a full reshaping of the walls in the other, with nothing in either source establishing which approach costs more or performs better.

For anyone planning a renovation at this scale, the useful question isn't which tier of intervention to pick. It's a sequence. Map how someone will actually move through the room first, before any cabinet gets designed. Then identify what specifically needs to disappear, whether that's shoes and coats at the door, appliances in the kitchen, or the bed itself.

Only then choose the tool: a structural change if the plan needs a fundamentally different sense of space, the way Warsaw's curved walls do; built-in millwork if it needs to conceal specific items at the entry or in the kitchen, the way East Village's cabinets do; or a connector that can become a partition, the way Towne House's teak divider does.

Any of those choices eventually runs into a wall that can't move, a pipe that can't relocate, or a permit that takes longer than expected, and those are questions worth raising with an architect or contractor before committing to a plan rather than after. Storage and layout choices reduce clutter and define zones only when they're paired with a circulation plan decided in advance. Add cabinetry without first deciding how someone will move through the room, and the same built-ins can just as easily narrow the space as open it up.