The secret to making your home appear larger
If you’ve painted your interiors white, hung a large mirror and employed every styling trick in the book to make your home feel bigger than it is, all to no avail, it may be time to consider more drastic measures.
These five design tricks can help transform a poky property into a home with a spacious, airy ambience. So if you’re planning a renovation, or just want to make some slight tweaks, keep these psychological tricks in mind.
1. Think outside the square
Try this for an experiment: picture a house, a room or a kitchen island bench. Done? Now pause to notice the shape that each takes in your mind. Chances are most, if not all, of the designs you visualised were rectangular or square. There’s good reason for this: these shapes are easier to plot within our homes and suburbs, and many building materials are extruded in rectilinear shapes as opposed to more organic curves.
But in the same way round tables usually fit small spaces better than their square or rectangular counterparts, circular fixtures can too. So if space is limited, think outside the square before automatically designing your fixtures with right angles.
2. Get curves in the right places
In a similar way, you can save worlds of space by ditching traditional space-guzzling staircases in favour of a graceful spiral number such as the one pictured here. These sculptural pieces are best suited for reaching tight spaces, such as attics or mezzanines – imagine trying to carry a couch, double bed or dining table up or down and you’ll understand why. Even though they don’t suit every person or every site, there’s no denying that spiral staircases graciously give small homes more space than they take.
3. Add French flavour
We’ve all heard that glass should be your new best friend when designing a home to create the illusion of space. Why? Because its transparent nature allows you to “borrow” views from other rooms by looking through it, instead of limiting your gaze to the walls of a single room.
Our brains are complex and creative creatures when it comes to interpreting spatial volumes: what the eye sees, the mind often believes. So if your vantage point lets you see multiple rooms instead of just one, you will feel as though you are inhabiting a larger space.
Installing French doors inside and out is a smart and straightforward way to take advantage of this spatial psychology. Better yet, take them right up to the ceiling and opt for sidelight windows on each side of the opening, like these striking black metal-framed glass doors.
4. Open wide
Similarly, the wider the doors, hallways and openings in your home, the more spacious it will feel. Although it can be necessary to delineate different rooms, it is often unnecessary to restrict yourself to an average door width. Wider openings bequeath homes with an open, airy ambience, while smaller thoroughfares can make interiors feel cramped and poky.
Tip: Sliding doors like this barn door can take up even less space because you don’t have to account for the room needed to swing the door open or closed.
5. Look up
How to create the illusion of a larger interior is not only about the horizontal plane – verticality can be paramount in making a space feel bigger than it is. Take this contemporary green and white bathroom for example. We’ve all seen bigger and smaller iterations, but there’s no question that the arched skylight visually amplifies the size of the room. Skylights can be designed in almost any shape and size you want, and both fixed and operable types are wonderful tools for enhancing the semblance of space.
Written by Julia Fairley. Republished with permission of Domain.com.au.