Just because a room is tiny doesn’t mean it can’t have a big presence. It may even have the “biggest” presence in the house. There are a lot of things you can learn from those who have either tiny homes or smaller properties. RV owners are especially resourceful when it comes to managing small spaces.
In this writing, we hope to stimulate your imagination with a few suggestions to help you more efficiently manage the space in a small room from multiple angles. Hopefully, at minimum, these tips inspire you to maximize what you have available.
1. Vertical Decor, Or Going The “Spartan” Route
When you decorate vertically, that makes the space you’re in more usable. The same is true when you store things vertically, which we’ll go over in more detail in the following point. At any rate, a little room can seem larger with a “Spartan” design. That may include paintings, pictures, posters, or even murals painted right on the wall. Wallpaper also has its place.
Essentially, “Spartan” décor is minimalistic. It eschews the trappings of the unnecessary and emphasizes sparse design. This makes little rooms look much larger—to a point. There’s a balance with Spartan design choices. Go into a department store that has been emptied, and the space seems surprisingly small.
It turns out obstacles before the eye propounds the illusion of space. There’s a mathematical paradox at work, and you can understand it if you look at coastlines. Measuring the inlets and peninsulas of coasts in detail produces a bigger number than the length of the coast itself. How is that possible?
Well, coastlines are essentially fractals. The thing is when you break up space in microcosm as a way of sort of reflecting the coastal macrocosm we just summarized, the eye has more to look at and the brain has more to process, making a small space seem much larger.
2. Storage And Furniture Considerations
What sort of furniture do you have in a room? If you’ve got a little room that’s ten feet wide and fifteen feet long, and you’ve got an eight-foot-wide couch that folds out into an eight-foot-long bed, then you’re only going to have eighty-sixed square feet left after you open up that couch. However, if you have, for example, bunk beds or a hammock, there’s more space.
When you’ve got little to work with, don’t take up too much room if at all possible. When you’ve got a tiny kitchen, instead of floor-to-ceiling cabinetry designed to act as a mobile pantry, maybe look into shaker style kitchen cabinets mounted just above head height. This opens up the space for other uses.
Often the reason small spaces aren’t properly utilized has much to do with the sort of furniture or storage being put into practice in such spaces.
You want options for stowing that which isn’t in regular use, they should be conveniently available, and if you store vertically, that’s a win-win all around. You maximize storage potential while minimizing the footprint of that storage on the room in question.
3. Mirrors, Windows, Light, And Greenery
Just as breaking up sight-lines tends to increase a person’s perception of space, so also adding mirrors has a very similar effect. If you’ve got a room that’s only a hundred square feet, surrounding the room in floor-to-ceiling mirrors can make it feel like a ballroom out of the 1700s. That’s a bit of poetic license, but you get the idea.
There are several reasons mirrors do this, among them light expansion. Mirrors seem to make light more powerful because they reflect it. So add mirrors.
If you’re building a house, then give tiny rooms lots of windows. If you can’t install windows, then have interior décor that puts windows in a central area.
Lastly, add some plants. Hanging snake plants, vines, little trees, succulents—these make rooms seem like some sort of little jungle. Also, they break unsightliness. Altogether the room feels bigger, even though there’s less space to use—it’s another paradoxical relationship.
Getting A Lot From Spaces You Wouldn’t Expect Had Such Heart
Mirrors, windows, light, greenery, storage, furniture considerations, vertical décor, and Spartan designs all represent fine tactics in maximizing the space available even in the smallest rooms. A closet can feel like a dancehall with a few of these suggestions. Explore the space you’re working with, and see which options most resonate with you.
