Three Ways to Make Your Small Room Look Bigger
Space in one’s home always seems highly valued. In fact, a significant factor behind the recent escalation in housing prices was a surge in the desire for more spacious properties, propelled by the pandemic’s influence on the need for additional room for home offices and areas for children. However, for many individuals, particularly those who have not yet made their first home purchase, acquiring additional space is often regarded as a costly indulgence.
If your home is feeling a little on the cramped side, there are ways you can address this without breaking out the sledgehammer. One of the simplest methods is to boost the perceived size of smaller rooms to give an overall impression of a more spacious home. There are many ways that this can be achieved – here are three of the easiest changes that will nonetheless make a big difference.
Get Rid of Clutter
This is a simple, and perhaps obvious, undertaking – but it is no less effective for it. De-cluttering a small room in your home will naturally have the impact of increasing available space, while having more of the walls visible will help to trick the eye.
There are myriad ways you can set out to de-clutter a room, with lifestyle coach personalities like Marie Kondo finding widespread appeal through their organisational methods and techniques. Unused possessions can be donated to charity or upcycled to give them a new lease of life. To help you decide which objects to keep and which to ditch, try dividing the items in each room between three boxes – for keeping, storing or throwing away. This simple method can be a hugely effective way of paring down the volume of ‘things’ in your home.
Think About Your Wall Space
It isn’t just the objects in a space that define its size. There are a number of factors that can make a room feel smaller and larger, such as light and shape. The amount of available space on your walls is one such factor. The more clutter in the form of frames, hangings, and essential installations like radiators, the more cramped you will feel.
With that in mind, paring back the number of things hung on your wall can re-introduce a sense of air to a space and modernising your radiators will have a profound effect in making the room feel less claustrophobic. For example, a bulky wall-spanning radiator could be replaced with a smaller, more efficient model to return some square-footage to you. Modern designs such as vertical radiators are easy to slot in between furniture. You could also make the most of dead space above a radiator, by installing a worktop or shelf to maximise usable surfaces as an alternative to traditional furniture options such as a display cabinet.
Décor and Decorations
Lastly, the decisions you make with regard to your room’s décor can have powerful results. Repainting your walls in a lighter colour can create a sense of expansion, whereas darker colours can make walls seem closer together.
Installing mirrors strategically around a small room can serve to brighten the space even more, while creating the illusion of distance through deepening the line of sight in certain key areas. A floor-to-ceiling curtain against a windowed wall can serve to ‘lift’ the ceiling, giving the impression of more headroom.
