4 Ways to Make Any Home Feel More Spacious

If you’re lucky enough to be moving into a new place, congratulations! With the proverbial blank canvas, you’re in a great position to get your interior spaces just the way you want them – including optimising their look and liveability.

For the rest of us, it’s likely that things have just evolved. Over time, you accumulate things. Your collection of furniture pieces becomes more eclectic, as you buy one or two new items at a time, to fill a specific need. And, as life happens, our homes tend to just cope with whatever we throw at (or into) them.

If things have started closing in on you, there are 4 fairly simple ways you can make your place look and feel more spacious. Of course, with each one, you can adjust a little – just so it makes a difference – or you can go all in and change everything to suit.

Have you heard of the FLiCS Principle?

Don’t bother googling the FLiCS Principle … because we just made it up!

We just want to make it easy to focus on 4 things: Furniture, Light, Colour and Stuff.

If you pay a bit of attention to each of those four, you’ll be amazed at how much more spacious your home will look and feel, and how much more liveable it is.

Stuff

We’ll start with Stuff. because it’s the easiest. When you walk into a room, is there any actual room? Or is every surface fully occupied? There’s no better example of ‘stuff happens’ than within individual rooms in our homes.

Bookcases and shelving invite you to put things in them, so you do. And then they’re full to overflowing. Tables and other flat surfaces, like the tops of storage units and chests of drawers, are there … so we put things on those, too. There’s no judgement here – unless you’re one of those rare people who’s able to resist. In other words, we all do it.

The problem is that every solid object that you see sucks the cubic metres out of a room. The more clutter, the more visually taxing it is for you to scan the space, let alone feel comfortable in it.

So, that’s a deserving number 1 on our list. Declutter. Just cull as much stuff as you can. Sell the stuff you don’t really need that you think still has some value (sometimes that makes the decision to part with it a bit easier), give a few things to the local charity thrift shop (that should make you feel like a good citizen), and put other stuff in drawers or cabinets.

If you do have a few knickknacks you’re really attached to that you’d like to have on display, rather than having them all around, group them so they appear to be a deliberate ‘installation’ and not just stuff.

Light

When it comes to creating a sense of space indoors, it can be as simple as “Let there be Light”. And by that we mean natural light, beaming in from outside.

The more light that’s coming in, the more of your room will be revealed. Getting some light into what might otherwise be dark corners makes a huge difference to the perception of not just space, but usable space.

There are a few ways to let more light in through existing windows. The easiest way is to clean them. We suggest that you google ‘how to clean glass without leaving streaks’. There are plenty of effective techniques out there, and that little bit of extra knowledge and effort will go a long way.

It’s also worth considering what window coverings you need. Any windows that don’t need to have curtains or blinds – either for privacy or being able to make the room dark for sleeping – might be better without. Where curtains are needed, can they be lighter, both in terms of weight and colour? Heavy and dark materials actually absorb light.

Similarly, keep large, tall pieces of furniture away from windows so they don’t block the flow of light into a room. 

If you can position mirrors or anything with a reflective surface where the light hits them, that can be incredibly effective in giving you a greater perception of light and space. 

Oh, and when you can see a lot of the outside world from inside, that provides an additional sense of enlargement, almost as if your room doesn’t stop at the wall/window.

Colour

As we just mentioned in reference to curtains, dark materials absorb light. Conversely, lighter colours reflect light and make a space feel open and airy. This applies to flooring and furnishings, as much as it does to paint colours, although we often tend to focus on the colour of walls and ceilings.

A good trick is to paint the walls and ceiling in the same shade, because that blurs the lines between them and, as your eye is drawn upward, there doesn’t seem to be an end. Walls appear to be taller and ceilings higher than they actually are (and, of course, a darker-coloured ceiling has the opposite effect).

The best colours for making a room seem bigger are soft tones like off-white, blues, and greens. And we’ve got another trick up our sleeves: painting your skirting boards and any other trims in a lighter colour makes the walls appear to be slightly further back!

Architects love white walls and ceilings, because nothing emphasises the shape and structure of a building better. But white walls also ensure that you can see everything in the room more clearly.

Oh, and one more colour hint that isn’t about painting: furnishings featuring bold plaids, stripes, or prints can appear to be ‘bigger’ than those in one single colour, so select solid-coloured upholstery and more neutral tones for furniture, where possible. 

Pieces of furniture that match the wall colour are less jarring and tend to blend with the space, giving the illusion of a bigger room.

Don’t forget, the principle of light colours and light materials applies across the board – but that also means that if you do want to make a room feel cosier, rather than bigger, you can use darker colours to achieve that.

Furniture

The furniture you have in your room makes a big difference to how spacious it feels – and not just how many pieces of furniture you have in there.

The size, shape, positioning, orientation, and (as mentioned above) colour of your furniture can all have an impact.

If you walk into a room and immediately encounter a piece of furniture, that obstruction to your easy movement is already making the room feel smaller. So, make sure there are clear paths for moving through the room as well as adequate space around each item.

As you consider the positioning and orientation (which direction it’s facing) of each piece of furniture, ask yourself does every one need to be there. Much like decluttering your stuff, removing just one not-really-necessary piece of furniture can have a profound impact on an entire space.

Then, think about the dimensions. If you find that your sofa is a behemoth consuming two-thirds of the room or you need to slide into your dining table chair for lack of clearance, it’s more feasible to replace furniture than to move walls.

On the subject of size and shape, taller furniture can have the effect of closing the room in, so taller things are best up against walls. And, remember, don’t position them where they’ll block the flow of light from windows.

If you choose a sofa and chairs with open arms and exposed legs, light will be able to filter under them, making the room appear airier. In fact, any item with longer, thinner legs is better for the sense of space than a piece that’s bulkier and lower to the floor.

Speaking of the floor, one simple thing to keep in mind is if you can see more of the floor, the room will look larger.

But wait ..

Here’s a bonus hint, regarding wall art:

One large painting, as opposed to several small ones, makes walls appear larger than they are. Try to hang your wall art at the average eye height so that there’s a lot of space above the work, making the room appear taller.

Good luck and enjoy your FLiCS-ing!

If you’re looking for internal or external painting, get in touch for a quote today.