When an apartment is small, the usual advice is to paint everything white and buy less. It is safe advice, and it often leads to a home that is tidy but does not feel like anyone's in particular.
ELLE Decoration Vietnam recently featured a 40 m² apartment in Stockholm that went another way. Its owner, the interior writer Sebastian Bergström, moved from a palette of grey, white and blue to one with tomato red, green and yellow, and the home is full of vintage furniture and patterned fabric.
You may not want that much color, and you do not need to. What is worth borrowing is the way he made decisions. He usually settles the colors first, then chooses the furniture.
Why choosing color first helps
Most of us do it the other way around. We fall in love with a sofa, buy it, and then try to make everything else work with it. By the time the curtains and the paint come up, the choices are already narrow.
Starting with color gives you a filter for everything you see afterward. When you are standing in a showroom, the question becomes simple: does this belong in our palette? In a small home, where you can see most of your furniture from one spot, that filter does a lot of work.
A simple way to set your palette
You do not need a design background for this. Choose three things:
- One main color for the largest surfaces, such as walls and big curtains. Pick one you could live with for years.
- One or two supporting colors for furniture, such as the sofa, the dining chairs or the cabinets.
- One accent color in small amounts, such as a cushion, a lamp or a painting.
Before you commit, put paint samples on the wall and look at them in the morning, in the afternoon and at night under your lamps. A color can look quite different in each light, and it is much cheaper to find that out now.
White is not your only option
A small room does not have to be pale. What usually makes a small home feel crowded is too many things competing for your eye, rather than color itself. A deeper shade on one wall can feel calm and cozy when the rest of the room stays simple.
If you are unsure, start with the rooms you pass through or spend less time in, such as the entrance or the bathroom. It is an easy place to try something braver.
Make small zones inside one room
In the Stockholm apartment, the living room is not treated as one continuous space. It is divided into smaller areas for eating, reading and watching television, and the owner feels this makes the home warmer and more intimate.
You can do this without building a single wall. A rug can mark the sitting area. A pendant lamp can mark the dining table. A shelf or a slightly different wall color can tell you that a corner has its own purpose. Each zone gives the eye somewhere to rest, and the room feels more considered.
Look up for storage
When floor space is limited, the walls are your best friend. The same apartment uses slim shelves that run up the height of the walls, a widened windowsill that becomes a useful surface, and a 30 cm deep shelf with built-in storage behind the sofa.
Look for these quiet opportunities in your own home:
- The space above doors and at the top of wardrobes
- A deeper windowsill that can also work as a seat or a small desk
- A narrow unit behind the sofa or along the hallway
These need measuring, so it helps to plan them early, before you buy your furniture.
Know what is easy to change
Color is a pleasure partly because some of it is easy to change. Cushions, rugs, lamps and even painted walls can all be updated later for little cost. Tiles, kitchen cabinets and built-in storage cannot.
So keep the things that are hard to change a little quieter, and let your stronger colors live in what you can replace. This fits the same thinking we shared in how to plan an apartment interior around your budget: spend first on what is hard to change later.
Before you go shopping
Take a moment to write down:
- Your three kinds of color, with a photo of each sample
- A floor plan with the sizes of each room
- The zones you want, and what your family will do in each one
- The places where you could add storage up high
With this one page, every shopping trip becomes easier, and you are far less likely to bring home a beautiful sofa that does not fit.
At SoulRoom, we design and build homes that are beautiful, comfortable and suited to your budget. Have a look through our projects for ideas on color and layout. If you have a small apartment and are not sure where to begin, send us a message with your floor plan and tell us a little about how your family lives.
