Most of us will at some point experience living in a smaller home or managing compact spaces. We can turn these small areas into wonderful, open spaces for living and relaxation that feel complete and, of course, comfortable. You don’t need to carry out a large and expensive building or home renovation project. Simple intentional decisions can be made about how to use your space to create more and better spaces. These decisions affect the use of light, the proportion of furniture and the flow through your space.
Making a room feel larger involves using light, getting the furniture proportions right, and creating a visual flow through the room. It’s not that hard and can make a big difference in a small room.
Now that you know the major secrets, you can start making changes to gain more visual room!
Honestly, it comes down to a few thoughtful adjustments to create the space that you need. Here are a few effective strategies for the various situations listed above to help create an open space in your home.
Maximize Natural Light and Strategic Lighting
Natural light & strategic lighting. First, light is going to make your room feel bigger. If your room is dark, it will feel closed in. On the other hand, a well-lit room will feel open and huge.
Heavier curtains and darker window treatments absorb light and can even block your view, making a room feel smaller. Keep your window treatments light and raise them as high as possible during the day to maximize the amount of natural light that enters your room. Natural light can travel deep within a room and bounce off surfaces, creating depth and making your room feel more spacious.
And what happens when natural light is scarce?
These small bulbs of light can be positioned all around a room, for example at the edges of a corner. To create a feeling of space, the light should be directed to the walls, creating the feeling that the walls are receding. All in all, the use of lighting in a room can have a big impact on the feeling of space that it creates. Lighting can create a feeling of space in a room. Different types and colors of lighting can create a specific mood or atmosphere. The choice of lighting is important when creating a specific mood or atmosphere.
Choose Light and Neutral Color Palettes
Using color to make a room look bigger. Using color in a room is a well-known trick to making a room look bigger. Using dark colors in a room will make the room look and feel smaller. This is because dark colors absorb light, which makes the walls seem to close in on you. Light colors, on the other hand, will make a room look and feel bigger as they will make the walls seem to recede.
Neutral colors allow for reflection and will create depth in the room. It is also a good idea to paint the baseboards and the ceiling with a similar color to the walls. This will eliminate strong lines between surfaces, and with no harsh contrasts, the eye will be able to move freely from floor to ceiling, creating the illusion of higher walls.
If you have favorite colors that are too dark to use on all of the walls, then use them for throw pillows, artwork, throw blankets, and more. Add them to your favorite chair, a bookshelf, or a few places around the room for a more personal touch.
Remember, you don’t have to lose the personality of a room to make it appear bigger.
Be Intentional with Furniture Choices and Scale
Of course, there are exceptions to the rule of choosing light furniture in small rooms, but beware of too large furniture, like too big a sofa or armchair. People often choose the biggest furniture they can find for the smallest rooms, and end up making the room look and feel too small, like a storage unit!
Scale changes everything.
So, for instance, a clean profile with raised legs is shown in the left-hand picture above. The coffee table, lounge chairs and floor lamps sit on legs, allowing a flow of light underneath the furniture to give an impression of lightness and ‘space’ within the room. The other pieces of furniture shown here block your view of the floor, and thus, give an impression of a ‘smaller’ room.
Multifunctional furniture is great for small spaces. This includes items like an ottoman that can contain storage within itself, a dining table that can extend, and a set of tables that can be stored within each other. These types of pieces are great because they provide additional function and create more space by keeping surfaces clear of clutter.
Maintain Uninterrupted Flooring Flow
The floor is the largest continuous surface area in any given space. Within said space, the flooring and surfaces can either add to the feeling of being in a large space, or subtract from it by cutting up the space into many small areas and making the room feel very busy.
The floor of your home is probably the largest surface area, so using it wisely will make a big difference to your perceptions. If your floors are currently broken up by lots of different flooring materials, such as carpets and hardwood flooring, try to create one large area using a light-colored flooring material. For example, budget-friendly wide-plank flooring in a light color is available from online wholesale vinyl flooring suppliers, so updating your home to a smooth, durable floor that makes the space feel larger could be easier than you thought. Not only will this create one large area, but extending the same flooring to adjacent rooms will help tie all of the spaces together and make your home’s overall floor plan feel larger.
Is your rug actually shrinking your layout?
Maybe. If you are using area rugs to create different areas within your home, then make sure the rug is the correct size for the space. A small rug in the middle of a room can make your space look very small and make your furniture arrangement look pieced together. Using a large rug that covers the floor and sits under the legs of your furniture is a great way to create a smooth and well-defined area.
Utilize Mirrors and Reflective Surfaces
A mirror has a very special place in a small room: to make the room look bigger, it is essential that a mirror is used to reflect light from natural sources or lamps and direct it to a particular area of the room. By having a mirror opposite a window, it is possible to create the impression of a larger room by using the light from outside the room to make the room look bigger than it really is.
Putting mirrors in small spaces of the home. To make a small room look larger, the mirror can be positioned opposite a window to reflect as much natural light as possible and to show off the view of a backyard or a garden. In the absence of a window, the mirror can be positioned behind a table lamp to reflect light throughout a room. In addition to the mirror, the space can also have reflective objects such as a glass-topped coffee table, metal furniture, and glossy wall paint. These reflect off of each other and create the illusion of more space in a room.
Think Vertically to Draw the Eye Upward
While working with small spaces, it is essential to make the most of your room’s vertical space. Try using your walls for guidance. By making eye contact with the ceiling, we immediately feel that we are in a higher space. To do this, we use curtain rods hung high on walls of bookcases that stretch up to the ceiling, as well as tall, thin artworks. In addition, we can place tall plants in tall vases or slender planters in the spaces between our books.
Of note, to make smaller spaces feel more massive, it is generally more effective to hang curtains and their associated rods higher up on walls, near the ceiling, as opposed to directly above a given window. Moreover, long curtains that extend all the way down to the floor will help draw the eye up toward the ceiling and create the sense of high ceilings typically reserved for much larger, more expansive spaces.
Similarly, you should use your walls to draw the eye upwards to make your room feel more spacious. Tall bookshelves, thin vertical paintings, and tall indoor plants are all good ways to make your room feel taller.
Clear the Clutter and Streamline Accessories
Clutter makes rooms feel small and can even make a spacious room feel cramped. Don’t let clutter in your home create feelings of discomfort or of being trapped. Make sure to keep the surfaces in your home clear of clutter.
Less really is more here.
By keeping the decoration to a few higher impact pieces in a small room, it can make for a really lovely and peaceful area and one where you actually want to be. So while making a small room feel bigger is about ‘cheating’ and using tricks to make it appear bigger, it’s also about creating a space and an area which is lovely and that you want to spend time in.