You might’ve already twigged it, the average interior size in the UK is getting smaller – so naturally, many people want to know how to make a room look bigger to reverse the damage. Fortunately, it’s easier to turn the tide than you might initially expect, and crucially, it doesn’t need to involve completely ditching your current furniture portfolio. To give you a bit of a spoiler, the key is to make use of the space you do have. This might mean rethinking layouts, making use of neglected corners or getting out the ol’ paint can and brush.
Either way, in smaller or odd-shaped rooms, it’s vital to learn how humans perceive space. Then, with a few helpful hints, you’ll know exactly how to make the most out of your space, no matter its architectural quirks or dimensions.
This article in a nutshell:
Where to Begin
A good place to start, before you even think about the tangible steps needed to make your room look bigger, is to reframe your thinking around size and dimensions – AKA not getting hung up on your pint-sized flat, vanishingly small kitchen or whatever it may be.
Remember those optical illusions that trick the brain into thinking two objects or shapes are the same size? The Müller-Lyer illusion is an incredibly popular one. Well, the reason we bring them up is that they prove how susceptible our minds can be to spatial deceit; even the simplest of tricks can utterly alter our perception.
Similar to these misleading shapes, much of the time it’s not the physicality of a room’s décor and furnishings moulding our conception of the interior, but how they are arranged. This goes to show that we can use these visual biases to our advantage, and why not? They’re hugely powerful. So, if you’re unwilling to give up your prized heirlooms or comfy bed – good news, there’s hope yet!
Things That Make Your Room Feel Smaller Than It Actually Is
Another important thing to consider before we get to grips with how you can make a small room look bigger, is thinking about its opposite: the mistakes you might be making that contribute to that overwhelming, cramped feel.
You might not have done this purposefully, nor are you alone; after all, many of these things constitute long-standing interior design myths. However, by setting your intentions on not falling into these pitfalls, you’ll have some great foundations to making your home feel more spacious.
Overdoing the Décor
Unless you’re actively going for an anti-minimalist aesthetic, by piling on the accessories, you run the risk of making the space feel cluttered, disorganised and unfocused. Really not what you want in a bedroom or office, where the aim is to set a tone of mindfulness and peace. Sometimes, even by merely removing a few decorative pieces or swapping them out for an alternative with smoother lines and a simpler silhouette you’ll find a sense of clarity coming through that wasn’t there before.
Overreliance on Dark Colours
While dark colours have the potential to create the most stunning interiors (Farrow and Ball’s Hague Blue is proof in the pudding) there’s an equal risk of dimming the room more than you anticipated. Generally, the extent to which it shrinks your space depends on the type of natural light entering in. North-facing rooms have cooler light, so here it makes sense to lean into it, but with warmer, sun-drenched south-facing rooms, it’s more effective to err towards the side of caution and pick out warmer shades with lighter undertones.
Overlooking the Lighting
From table lamps to overhead fixtures, lighting is a tremendously useful tool in curating your space. However, with great power comes great responsibility; put the lights in the wrong place or pick the wrong type of bulbs and things can end up looking harsh and unwelcoming. With cooler light in particular, it doesn’t help to illuminate the areas you want to soften. For instance, the lighting in a low-ceilinged living room should account for the lack of headroom, avoiding long pendant fixtures and instead focusing on spreading the warmth across the room evenly with a mix of ambient and task lighting.
Oversized or Ill-Proportioned Furniture
While I’m sure many of us have thought about going big with our furniture, sometimes it’s just not right for the room. Whether this is a large sofa collection that only just squeezes into the room or a chest of drawers that made more sense in your previous abode, if it doesn’t fit, it’s simply not meant to be. Here, it’s better to prioritise unobstructed movement, a more cohesive look and lighter feel – in the end, it will appear ten times more intentional.
How to Make a Small Room Look Bigger with These 24 Transformative Tips
With all of those important elements ticked off, it’s time to get to the main event – sharing how you can make a small room look bigger. Here we’re about to divulge 24 distinct tips, and for convenience, we’ve split them up into a few categories. First, there’s the fundamental advice that covers interiors of all kinds, but after that we’ll be offering up suggestions unique to different room functions.
Universal Tips
1. Welcome the Daylight
Daylight is fantastic for opening up rooms, so it stands to reason that you should let in as much of it as possible. Those with a budget on the larger end could consider adding a skylight, knocking down walls where it’s safe to do so, or even replacing wooden external doors with glass ones. If your budget is more conservative, tricks like switching out heavy curtains with sheer ones or positioning a mirror opposite a window are nifty workarounds.
2. Think About Using Soft Colours
No matter the levels of natural light, paler colours tend to help rooms look bigger. While, of course, there’s a lot more to it than simply splashing your 4 walls with a neutral shade (which can look too clinical if you’re not careful), it’s a wonderful canvas for the rest of your décor. If you do happen to be worried about the room feeling flat or uninspired, remember that you can always layer secondary colours via your soft furnishings, doors, trim and accessories.
Another thing to keep in mind is the role of the ceiling. While the convention is to paint it a simple shade of white, note that you don’t have to box yourself in. Another alternative is to bring the same wall colour or an ever-so-slightly lighter version up to the ceiling. This way, they gently melt upwards, disguising the true height of the room. In our experience, it can maintain an effortless cosiness – but do know that it can be difficult to decipher precisely which colours make a room look bigger in every case. Hence why trialling paint samples is always a good idea.
3. Try Stripes
Stripes might not be your first port of call when attempting to transform your living space for comfort, but stay with us. Cast your mind back to what we said about optical illusions. Well, here’s a practical example. Because of a weird psychological quirk wherein humans typically demonstrate a bias towards vertical lines, i.e., we perceive them as longer than their horizontal counterparts, it’s easy to leverage stripes to create a sense of height.
You don’t have to deck your entire space with stripes either; a scattergun approach will work too if you execute it professionally. We’re thinking a striped feature wall, wallpapering the recesses of a storage cabinet with a stripey wallpaper, or even simply arranging wall hangings in vertical lines.
4. Exploit Every Inch
When space is at a premium, you’ve got to make the most of every single square foot. This could translate into open shelving, wall-mounted storage cabinets, corner display units, sideboards or, perhaps most excitingly, transforming an unused alcove into a seating area with bespoke banquette fixtures. Also, don’t be afraid to float your furniture side-by-side. While many argue that the larger pieces of furniture in your interior should go against the wall to leave as much space as possible, this can equally throw a spanner in the works for your navigation, socialising and balance. Of course, some pieces like a dining table in a living room, might be better off consigned to the edges, but avoid pushing everything back.
5. Find a Focal Point
As we’ve well established, designing a room layout is all about psychology, and focal points are a great way to influence how people see your room. Think of it as visual storytelling; by positioning an object such as a sofa, dining sets or coffee table as a centrepiece, you’re transmitting the subliminal message that they’re important, anchoring these furniture pieces in the space and providing a route for your eyes to follow.
In a kitchen or dining room, it’s more obvious to pinpoint them, but in a living room without a natural focal point like a fireplace, you might have to do a bit more pondering. Lucky for you, we created a guide to help you through the process – we highly recommend checking it out.
6. Take the Time to Reflect
This tip is one of the oldest in the interior designer's book. It’s as simple as putting up mirrors in strategic places to reflect both natural and artificial light into key areas, thereby opening up the space and creating a sense of airiness and vitality. Mirrors are particularly great if you’ve only got small windows or only a few of them – place big frames nearby to reflect the outside world and you’ll see such a difference. You can achieve a similar effect with glass-topped furniture and pieces with metallic finishes. See our dedicated guide for all the details.
7. Play to Your Strengths
There’s no point forcing the room against its inherent nature. Instead try to emphasise your room’s strong points. If a room is tall, accentuate that height with shelves or a bookcase. If you have low ceilings, don’t use tall furniture. This just makes the room feel cramped.
If you’ve got a wide or long room, place more prominent pieces of furniture against the walls to prove it. This is especially effective in kitchens, where you can use shelving or worktops to maximise space and create valuable kitchen space saving ideas.
Bedrooms
8. Floating Bedside Cabinets
In especially snug bedrooms, you might struggle to fit the traditional duo of bedside cabinets on either side of the bed, along with the space you need to traverse the space. This is where floating bedside tables can come in handy. By mounting them on the wall, you get the doubled benefit of visual decluttering and physical space won back, plus they look incredibly slick – ideal for more modern bedroom designs. Not quite so sure? Check out our bedside cabinet buyer’s guide for the complete lowdown.
9. Conceal Under the Bed Storage with Valances
Your bed is the ideal place to hide away all of your unsightly clutter, but who wants their storage boxes poking out from underneath? Fortunately, we have the solution. Valances. For the unacquainted, these are decorative sheets that conceal the bedframe and add a sense of softness and elegance to the design. If you’re one to dump things under the bed, or want to hide its built-in drawers, this is surely the way to go.
10. Don’t Forget to Use Alcoves
Plenty of older bedrooms have fun architectural features like alcoves, which add a whole new dimension of charm. But if you’re not exploiting their full potential, future you might kick yourself. Why, you ask? For one, they make a wonderful spot for dressing tables or even a makeshift office set-up if you occasionally work from home. Whatever the case, don’t leave them unattended.
Bathrooms
11. Two-In-One Fixtures
We mentioned this in our understairs toilet measurement guide, but it’s worth reemphasising here too. Essentially, you can double up your bathroom fixtures by opting for multipurpose varieties. Think a sink over the toilet cistern or sinks on top of bathroom cabinets. The best part is that whatever you choose, there is going to be a world of stylistic options and colours.
12. Cabinet Door Storage
Another storage hack that goes a long way to make a room feel larger is incorporating cabinet door storage into your scheme. These handy organisers might sit on the back of the bathroom door, or you might even be able to hide them away inside an existing cabinet or sideboard.
13. Deprioritise the Bath
Our last spatial hack for bathrooms is all about the bath. You might not want to hear this, but in tiny bathrooms where the storage is seriously lacking, you might be better off biting the bullet. After all, removing the tub will free up plenty of floorspace, which you can then use as storage for your towels, toiletries and the pyramid of loo rolls you’d rather not see on the daily. Not ready to give up the bath just yet? A corner shower bath is the next best alternative.
Kitchens
14. Dining Nooks
When your kitchen doesn’t meet your requirements for the dining area, be it because of an awkward kitchen layout or simply a lack of room, there are plenty of ways to carve out a zone that does the job. While a little more casual than your typical dining table set-up, dining nooks bring a lovely sense of zeal into the room, without taking up too much space. Use a variety of eclectic seating from barstools and slimline chairs to storage banquettes or benches, and you can instil serious character, even if the interior in question belongs to a new build.
15. Two-Tiered Kitchen Islands
If you were considering adding a kitchen island into your culinary environment, allow us to offer a suggestion: the classy two-tiered kitchen island. Not only does this handy surface provide an irresistibly intriguing aesthetic, but it’s a really efficient use of space. With the two levels it’s easy to divide up the workspace without eating up precious floorspace, all whilst concealing clutter behind the elevated part. You also get a much cleaner silhouette than a traditional dining table as there aren’t all the legs contributing to visual weight.
16. Hooks & Magnetic Strips
Another handy solution to your storage qualms is the use of vertical storage. From traditional farmhouse-style hooks and open shelving showing off your crockery to magnetic strips for keeping your utensils out of the way, there are plenty of options that double up as aesthetic features in of themselves.
Living Rooms
17. Sofa Positioning
In the living room, perhaps the most important aspect of the furniture arrangement lies in where you position the sofa – not to mention which one you pick. Ideally, you want a 1.5m minimum distance between the seating and the TV if you have one and then 30-45cm of clearance for the coffee table, but besides this you have a lot of free rein in designing the room. To see a few arrangement examples, take a look at our living room layouts guide.
18. Ditch the Curtains
Sometimes weighty, long or heavily decorative curtains can create a sense of visual weight that brings the mood down. A way to get around this problem is by opting for blinds instead. Unlike curtains, they don’t take up any space on the sides of the window or obstruct the main view when fully opened. Here’s a bonus tip: you can match your sofa material with the blinds, or even cushions, if you go down the more bespoke route.
19. Knock Through to Your Kitchen / Dining Room
Another method of making your living room feel bigger is by quite literally making it bigger, or at least removing physical barriers between this room and the next. Even taking off double doors and leaving the gap as an arch can bring a great deal of openness and navigability into the design.
Home Offices
20. Discover the Power of the Murphy Desk
Another helpful hint we’re returning to after mentioning it in our spare room office inspo piece is the classic, the murphy desk. This handy piece of kit is essentially a desk that can be folded up and out of the way when it’s not being used. A gamechanger if it’s going to get in the way of other people.
21. Utilise Nooks & Crannies
If there was anything we learnt from the lockdown years, it’s that even the smallest of spaces can become your WFH haven. From small alcoves to bay windows, these tiny pockets scattered across your home have real potential, especially when you only need a few square meters to work with if it’s only laptop space and somewhere to prop a mug of tea that you need.
Attic Rooms
22. Low-Profile
As we mentioned earlier and in our attic room design guide, low profile bedroom furniture is your closest ally. This means saying goodbye to wardrobes and hello to drawers, storage boxes and console tables. With the focus now further away from the ceiling and its looming presence, you’ll immediately feel more at ease.
23. Make the Ceiling a Feature…
Bold enough to commit to something a little more daring? Then why not turn the ceiling into a feature? Whether that’s in the form of wallpapering it with an interesting motif, painting it an interesting colour or letting the beams to shine, there’s plenty of ways to draw the eye upwards and create a sense of height.
24. Or Take Attention Away From It
Conversely, you might want to distract from the lower ceiling. The best way to do that? By spotlighting your walls or your floors. Eclectic tiling, chevron flooring and wood-panelled walls are all standout options, but truly the ideas are limitless.
Earn Back the Inches
There we go: all our favourite space-saving, perception-altering tips. With these in your interior design arsenal, it’ll be easier than ever to reimagine less-than-desirable spaces and take back control of their functionality. Which will be the first you implement?...
