The average New York City apartment is roughly the size of a parking space with delusions of grandeur. But according to interior designers speaking with NPR, a handful of specific, cheap, and surprisingly effective tricks can make even the most aggressively tiny room feel like you didn't make a terrible life decision.
Get Your Furniture Off the Floor, Seriously
NPR's Life Kit spoke with Shamika Lynch, founder of the design firm Maximizing Tiny Interiors in New Jersey, who says the single most important principle in a small space is this: every item in your home needs to earn its place. "You don't have extra square footage for things that are just going to be decorative," Lynch told NPR. No passengers. Everything works or it leaves.
The practical application of this philosophy starts on the floor. The more floor you can see, the bigger a room feels. Lynch recommends multi-function furniture — ditch the separate table, bench, and coat rack at your entryway and find one piece that does all three jobs. Less stuff, same function, more breathing room.
Home design consultant Alexandra Gater, author of Own Your Space, takes it further. Swap out that bulky floor lamp for plug-in wall sconces. Mount your mirror to the wall instead of leaning it against it. Professional organizer Faith Roberson adds that floor-to-ceiling bookcases or cabinets pull double duty: they give you storage while drawing the eye upward, which adds perceived height without touching a single structural element of your apartment.
Pull Your Couch Away from the Wall (Yes, Really)
This one sounds insane. You have roughly 400 square feet and someone is telling you to waste some of it on empty space behind your sofa. Stick with it.
Gater explained to NPR that adding about 18 to 24 inches of walking room behind your couch, armchairs, or side tables creates what designers call the illusion of depth. The room stops looking flat. More light moves through the space, more shadows form, and your sight lines start to overlap in a way that tricks the brain into perceiving more square footage than actually exists. It's not magic. It's just how human visual processing works, and it costs you nothing.
The key, Gater says, is to anchor the floating furniture so it doesn't just look like you couldn't figure out where to put things. A rug, a console table, or a set of shelves behind the couch gives the arrangement a focal point and makes it look intentional rather than confused.
The Curtain Trick That Makes Ceilings Feel Taller
Here is a piece of information that should be taught in schools: you are almost certainly hanging your curtains wrong. Most people mount the rod right at the top of the window frame. This is a mistake that costs nothing to fix and makes an enormous difference.
Gater told NPR to hang your curtain rod 6 to 12 inches above the window frame, and extend it 5 to 10 inches wider than the frame on each side. The result is that your window looks dramatically larger, your ceiling looks higher, and more natural light floods into the room when the curtains are open because the fabric isn't blocking the glass. The curtains themselves should be long enough to just graze the floor, what Gater calls "kissing the floor." Too short looks like you measured wrong. Too long and you're just growing a dust bunny farm on your baseboards.
This trick costs the price of a longer curtain rod and maybe a new set of panels. The visual payoff is a room that reads as significantly taller and wider. It is maybe the most efficient design upgrade that exists.
Stop Being Scared of Committing to One Color
The accent wall had a good run. It's done now. Lynch told NPR that painting just one wall a statement color actually works against you in a small space because it visually fragments the room, creating a boundary where you want continuity.
The counter-intuitive fix is to go all in on a single color for all your walls. Not necessarily a pale, safe, builder-beige color either. Lynch says it doesn't matter whether you pick something dark or light, bold or neutral. What matters is consistency. One color, all walls, no interruptions. That continuity makes the space read as larger and more intentional.
If you want to push further, Gater recommends a technique called color drenching, which extends the wall color up onto the ceiling and down to the baseboards. By removing those visual boundaries, your eye stops registering where the walls end and the ceiling begins. The room doesn't look painted. It looks bigger.
The Dollhouse Trap Nobody Warns You About
There's a specific mistake people make when furnishing small spaces: they buy everything small. Tiny sofa, tiny coffee table, tiny art prints, eight decorative throw pillows. The logic makes sense on paper. The result looks like a set for a children's television program.
NPR's reporting flagged what designers call the "dollhouse effect," where too many small pieces crowd a room and make it feel more cluttered, not less. The fix is to choose furniture that's appropriately scaled to your space, even if that means fewer pieces. A single statement chair beats three undersized ones. One good-sized piece of art beats a gallery wall of postcard-sized frames. Your room should look like a home, not a sample sale.
The through-line across all five of these tricks is the same: thoughtful, intentional choices beat accumulation every time. You are not solving a small space by adding more things to it.
The Dingo Take
Look, there's a reason this kind of reporting matters right now. Housing in the United States is a catastrophe. Rents are obscene, ownership is out of reach for a growing slice of the population, and millions of people are living in spaces that a previous generation would have considered temporary at best. The design industry's answer to this has historically been "just buy a bigger place" or "renovate your kitchen," which is genuinely useless advice for anyone paying $2,400 a month for 500 square feet in a city where that's considered a deal.
What NPR's Life Kit piece actually does is treat small-space living as a permanent condition that deserves serious, practical solutions rather than a temporary problem to be solved with more money. Hanging curtains higher costs nothing. Floating your furniture costs nothing. Color drenching costs a can of paint. These are not luxury tips. They're real, accessible interventions for people who are not going to be upgrading anytime soon.
The housing crisis isn't going to be solved by curtain placement. That's obvious. But when the political will to actually fix affordability has gone almost completely missing at the federal level, at least someone is giving people something useful they can do on a Tuesday afternoon. Small mercies. Literally.
