Small apartments can be tricky when it comes to design. You don’t have a lot of space to work with, so a generous helping of creativity is important. There are lots of tips out there to help you figure out how to decorate a small apartment, but if you need extra space, a lick of paint might not be enough. You can’t add extra rooms. What you can do, however, is create separate living zones to create the illusion of more space.
Living Zones
In a larger apartment, you’d have different rooms for different things. For example, you might have a kitchen and separate dining room, a living area, and bedrooms. In a small apartment, your space is limited, so it isn’t uncommon to have a large open-plan arrangement where you sleep, cook, relax, and entertain. There is nothing wrong with this layout, but defining separate zones makes it easier to draw a line between work, play, and sleep.
Research tells us that a cluttered bedroom is not conducive to sleep. It is also bad if we work in the bedroom or treat it as an extension of the living room. If you own or rent a small apartment, you may not have a separate bedroom. Your kitchen is also likely to be part of your living area, which makes it hard to hide the mess when friends come over.
Building Partition Walls
Simple partition walls are easy to erect. Use plywood as your material of choice. Ply is a tough but attractive type of timber board. Made from layers of wood glued together, plywood is easy to work with. You can buy large sheets of birchwood ply from any DIY outlet. Cut to size and fix in place using brackets or a timber frame. Ply can be varnished, stained, or painted. Its natural wood finish is attractive, especially if your apartment has an industrial theme.
Construct A Mezzanine Floor
If your apartment is blessed with high ceilings, you have the option of building a mezzanine floor. Place your bed up there and use it as a separate sleep space. Just watch out that you have enough headroom, as you don’t want to crack your head on the ceiling each time you sit up in bed.
Temporary Screens
Using screens and partitions is one way to create different zones, but you don’t have to go all DIY and build partition walls. In any event, you wouldn’t be able to do this if you leased the apartment. What you can do is construct temporary screens to define your sleeping area, home office, and dining room.
Look at Chinese homes for an example of how simple screens can be highly effective. Bamboo-paper screens are common in Chinese homes. You can create your screens using a similar technique. Decorate them or leave them in places. Move them around to suit your needs. This technique is ideal in a rental apartment when you can’t make structural alterations.
We hope these ideas have inspired you. Small apartments don’t need to feel claustrophobic!
