Whether you want to sell your home or just make it look more inviting to guests, knowing how to make small rooms look bigger can help you transform your home.
Thankfully, there are a number of creative ways to make a small room look larger without having to knock down walls or undertake any drastic renovations.
Here we run through some of our favourite ways to make small rooms look bigger:
Use Mirrors To Reflect Light
Dark rooms tend to feel small, almost cellar like, whereas light and airy rooms tend to feel larger and more spacious. Use this to your advantage.
A carefully placed mirror can help to reflect light around the room and brighten the place up. Not only that, but the reflection itself will give more of a feeling of space.
That’s why mirrors work so well in tight hallways. Try and place the mirror opposite a window for best effect.
Keep The Decor Bright
This doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy a tin of luminous yellow paint! Even a lick of white paint can brighten up a room to help it feel bigger.
This also applies to your furniture, try and avoid placing dark sofas, wardrobes, coffee tables, and so on inside small rooms.
Minimise Furniture
The more furniture you put in a room, the smaller the room will appear. Therefore don’t put more furniture in a small room than is necessary.
In the case of living rooms, try and get one larger sofa that fits your space perfectly rather than taking up space with multiple chairs or smaller sofas.
Use Furniture On Legs
In a small bedroom use a bed that has a visible open space underneath. Likewise, in a small living room use a sofa with exposed legs.
Being able to see underneath the future helps to create that illusion of a room being larger than it actually is.
Make Use Of Clear Furniture
Clear or glass desks, coffee tables and ornaments feel like they take up less space.
Better yet, they are fashionable too!
Ditch The Curtains
Heavy curtains over windows make the room feel more enclosed and take up vital wall space.
If it’s practical, remove the curtains altogether. This will maximise the amount of light entering the room and create more of a feeling of depth.
If you’re overlooked by neighbours or just don’t like the idea of going completely curtain-free, install blinds inside the recess of the window to limit the impact they have on the feeling of space.
Stripes Are Your Friend
Stripes are well-known for helping things look longer or wider depending on the direction the stripes run.
The same rules apply in your home. A striped carpet or rug and can make the walls feel further apart. Vertical stripes on wallpaper can make the ceiling feel higher.
Both will have the impact of making your room feel that much bigger.
Paint Opposite Walls The Same Colour
Why have one feature wall when you can have two? Painting two walls on opposite sides of the room in the same colour can help to make them feel further apart.
Just be sure to stick to the earlier rule of using light and bright colours!
Go Large With Ornaments, Not Small!
It’s natural to assume that you need to use small decorative items in small rooms, yet, the opposite is actually true!
Small ornaments can end up leaving a room looking cluttered. You’re far better going for fewer, larger ornaments than lots of smaller ones.
Make Use Of Multi-Purpose Furniture
When space is at a premium, your furniture needs to get more creative. Try and pick furniture that can do more than one thing.
A footstool that has storage space or a coffee table that becomes a desk, for example, are great ways to save space in a small room.
Draw The Eyes Upwards
When asking how to make small rooms look bigger, look no further than upwards!
A carefully positioned shelf high on a wall or patterned wallpaper on the ceiling can help to draw the eye upwards.
This then gives a feeling of height in a room which stops it feeling quite as enclosed.
Hang The TV On The Wall
TV stands and cabinets can take up a lot of space. Plus, there’s always some wasted space between the TV and the wall.
Solve this by using a bracket to hang the TV on the wall and getting rid of your stand or cabinet.
Use Free-Standing Lights
Overhead lighting can be a disadvantage in smaller rooms. It causes the whole of the room to be lit fairly evenly, all at once.
Compare that to using a few smaller, free-standing lights and lamps and you’ll see that when you light rooms unevenly, space will magically appear.
How To Make Small Rooms Look Bigger – Summary
So there we have it, there are lots of ways of how to make small rooms look bigger. The best thing to do is experiment and find the ones that work for you.
Keep in mind that this is also not an exhaustive list, all you need to do is get creative and you’ll find your own ways to make rooms look larger too!
For more inspiration, don’t forget to check out our list of the best home improvement websites in the UK.
