If you’re living in a studio apartment, then getting the best from the available space is absolutely essential. Studio living needn’t mean feeling claustrophobic and cramped: with a few simple measures, you can economise on the space available, and stretch your legs a little as a reward.
Declutter
The practice of getting rid of superfluous junk has become widespread and popular in recent years. There’s a therapeutic element to decluttering, too: it feels good once you’ve cleared a space. In a studio apartment, you’ll want to be proactive when it comes to decluttering. Go from room to room and assemble all of the items you don’t need. Separate them according to their destination: one pile for the bin, one pile for the charity shop, one pile for sale on local listings.
Demarcate space
One of the problems with open-plan living is that the purpose of each part of the space can become lost. You might feel that you’re spending your time in one large room that does several things badly, rather than a constellation of smaller, more specialised spaces.
Fortunately, you don’t need to throw walls up to divide up the space. Decide where your living area is going to be, and whether you need office space. Think about whether you can, or will, accommodate guests. Once you’ve got an idea of what you want from your appartment, you can create stark dividing lines with the help of items of furniture, rugs, screens and curtains.
Open furniture
If you can see all the way through an item of furniture, you can use it to divide the room while still allowing light to disperse. Bookshelves and dressers can serve this function nicely. If you’ve got the space for it, you might even set up a walk-in wardrobe in an unused spare bedroom, thereby freeing up space elsewhere.
Walls and doors
Make the maximum use of your walls and doors by incorporating hanging storage into them. This goes especially for the backs of your cupboard doors in the kitchen. Each one can offer extra room for smaller items to hang. Again, this will free up space for elsewhere.
Enhance by design
The strategic use of mirrors will help you to distribute light throughout the interior, and make the space look bigger. If the mirror is large enough, and you’re looking at it from the corner of your eye, then you might subconsciously intuit that the room is twice as large as it really is.
But it’s not just mirrored surfaces that distribute light. Everything reflects light, as a matter of physics – it’s just that mirrors don’t distort the light as much as, say, a plastered wall. The upshot of this is that you should look for lighter shade of paint, if you want more light spread around your interior.
Leave a Reply