How to fix up small apartments
CITYWIDE When Laura Rogers first saw her new Lincoln Boulevard apartment more than three months ago, the Maryland native found herself in a studio apartment without character, featuring dingy blue walls and basic horizontal blinds.
Fresh from the Savannah College of Art and Design, the creative juices immediately started flowing for the 24-year-old interior designer. Before even moving in to the tiny 293.5-square-foot unit, Rogers gave her future home an extreme makeover, painting her apartment a light champagne brown and turquoise, adding draperies and bamboo screens over the windows.
A reflection of her personality, the space was finally hers.
The design of the apartment recently won Rogers, an interior designer with a hotel design firm in Santa Monica, second place in the Smallest Coolest Apartment 2007 competition, a nationwide contest to find the best-designed apartment in the world under 650 square feet. The competition was sponsored by Design Within Reach and ApartmentTherapy.com, an interior design Web log.
The city of Santa Monica is one of the few places where renters actually outnumber homeowners. Many tenants, seeing their apartment living situation as a temporary step before making the leap to home ownership, might be reluctant to take the time to actually decorate their apartments, leaving the walls the typical stale white and the windows covered with the uninspiring off-white blinds.
“People think of their (apartment) home as temporary and are waiting for the perfect place,” said Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, founder of ApartmentTherapy.com and a New York City interior design firm by the same name. “I find that it usually takes a lot longer than people think it does.”
A home is a person’s sanctuary and it’s important to make the space, whether it’s temporary or permanent, 200 square feet or 20,000 square feet, their own, interior designers say. This is particularly true for renters of small apartments where some creative interior designing can create extra visual space.
“You should be as committed to the home as you can be because the rewards are really infinite in terms of comfort and happiness,” Gillingham-Ryan said. “Your home is the starting point every day in life and the ending point. It’s the only space to call your own.”
One of the best ways to create extra space in a small apartment is plain and simple — eliminate the clutter.
“Clutter is definitely an issue in our country,” Gillingham- Ryan said.“Americans are good at consuming... but not good at ‘unconsuming’ or clearing out.”
A good tactic in creating extra visual room is to define spaces within a studio unit,painting the kitchen,bed and living areas in different colors and adding drapery to separate the spaces.
Many small apartments have an entry way that opens up into the main room. One way to create more visual space is to paint the entryway in a dark color and the main room in a lighter tone.
In Rogers’ studio apartment, a curtain acts as a divider between the living room/kitchen and the bedroom. Her bedroom is also painted turquoise and champagne brown while the living room/kitchen is only painted in the champagne color.
Space is tight in her 293-square-foot apartment,with a coun-tertop oven and stove and a below counter refrigerator.
The renter can incorporate their own personality into the apartment through decorating the unit with memorable pieces, such as family photos or a keepsake they picked up during a trip. The unit will take on a more personal feel than if it were decorated in mass-produced items from a store such as Pottery Barn, Gillingham-Ryan said.
Decorating an apartment can be an inexpensive venture, costing Rogers only about $1,000 to redo the entire unit.
Most of the furniture was purchased at garage sales and flea markets and refurbished.The remainder came from Wal-Mart.
“It’s important to make it your own, even if it’s only there for a little while,” Rogers said.
“That’s your sanctuary, your home. Make it into something.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 2, 2007. Read the original PDF.