How to make a small room look bigger

Often our reasons for feeling that we need to move house is because the rooms feel too small, so today we look at some of the inexpensive ways in which we can make a room appear to be more spacious. I will be focusing on the living room, but the principles apply to all rooms, although often with less flexibility such as a bedroom which will be dominated by the bed and maybe a free-standing wardrobe.

A good starting point is to draw up a plan of the room: squared paper is very useful for this and you can use the same paper to draw and cut out plans of all your furniture. You will need to measure the room and the furniture so that they are to the same scale. For interiors, I usually let one 1/2cm square on the paper equal 10cm.

In an earlier blog, I looked at fitting two studio apartments into a one-bedroom flat, where I used cutouts of the furniture to experiment with different layouts. Two important things to think about when working on the layout is to make sure that you have enough circulation space - a minimum of 35cm if you need to walk between items, but ideally 50cm where this is the main access to the room. The second important thing is to make sure that you can open the doors, of the room and of the furniture. I have an electric piano in a corner next to my wardrobe which I need to move whenever I want access to the one side of the cupboard - fortunately I can reserve this space for out-of-season clothes, so I only use it a couple of times each year, but be careful of this with cupboards that you use regularly.

The scale of the furniture is critical in a small room - if the key pieces are too large, they will dominate the space and leave little space for other pieces. Mid-century furniture or replicas are a great choice, as they are often economical of space with narrow arms and not too much padding, yet not too small that the room looks like it stepped out of a dolls-house. A good rule-of-thumb is that the larger pieces (for example, the couch or TV stand) should not be bigger than 2/3 of the wall that the long side of the furniture is situated. 

Paint colour can play an important role in visually adapting the space. Darker colours will tend to make a space look smaller and the dark surface will appear closer than in reality. Using this principle, it is usually a good idea to keep the ceiling in a light colour, white or in the blue hues as blue appears to recede. If the room is quite narrow, you can paint one of the walls on the short side in a mid-hue colour, which will make the room seem more balanced and give interest to the space.

Artwork can be an inexpensive way of giving the room scale and interest: a small room with blank walls will tend to look like a hospital ward or prison cell! Here it is critical not to use over-large pieces, but lots of smaller frames will tend to look cluttered and a single small work on a wall can increase the feeling of the room being very small. One way to get around this is to find a set of matching frames and arrange them into a harmonious composition. You may want to make a sketch of the wall with its main furniture in place and try out different layouts.

Four small sketches read as a single composition

Another trick to make an artwork better proportioned to the space is to use a slightly larger frame and give the picture a mount. 

A print with a double mount gives this picture greater presence in the space

Gallery walls and multiple artworks on one wall are seldom effective in smaller spaces, as they tend to be too busy. This applies to ornaments and other smaller pieces - if you have too many things you like to display, rather store most of them and bring them out in rotation: this also enlivens that space giving it a slightly different feel as you swap things out. I will be looking at storage strategies in another blog, but here just to note that storage should either be at a low level (say under the couch) or at a high level on a shelf. Eye-level, both when standing and sitting, is where we want to hold the visual interest.

So far, we have been working with our existing furniture and artworks, but we may have the resources to be more adventurous. If you are looking to reupholster or buy new furniture, here is an opportunity to work with colour and texture. Patterned fabric for carpet, couches and curtains should be avoided, but are fine for a smaller chair to give an accent. This said, you can add interest to the room by varying the textures, while using a relatively small range of colours. Curtains, counter-intuitively, should ideally be full-length - if they are just the height of the window they will tend to visually fragment the space.

A useful tip is to use a mirror, but locate this out of the line of sight when someone is sitting - it is very disconcerting for your guest to see their reflection throughout their visit! A mirror will tend to double the apparent width of the room, so this is a great way of making a narrow space seem wider.

A large mirror can add width to the space

Lastly, take a tour of the room, sitting in each of the chairs and couch: where do you need an accent - maybe two or three scatter cushions in a contrasting colour, or a pot plant in an empty corner.