4 Highly Effective Ways to Make Your Home Look More Expensive

You’re getting older, and your secondhand furniture is, too. While you may feel like you’re outgrowing your taste, don’t make a knee-jerk reaction and drop major bucks to redecorate your whole house with more grown-up gear (you know, the kind you don’t have to assemble yourself). There’s a secret to looking expensive on the cheap: Restraint.

Don’t replace everything. Just replace one thing. A single investment piece will elevate your whole space with a more high-end look, even if it cost as much as all the other inexpensive basics put together. Here are the four pieces that give you the most bang for your buck.

Above: A mid-century dining room in Perth, Australia, from Collected Interiors.

Step one: Take down all your cheap frames and discount bin wooden plaques and donate them to Goodwill. Step two: Replace it all with just one big, bold and beautiful painting or print as a focal point on the wall. Done.

→ The Best Stores for Big (Really Big!) Artwork & Prints

Luxury is in the hardware. What amazing appliances can do for a kitchen, a statement light fixture can do in any other room in the house.

It can be tough, mentally, to get over the hurdle of spending so much for something just to walk all over it. But a properly sized rug (try this tape technique) really does change a room. And if it’s something you love and take care of, you could have it for many more apartments to come.

This can mean throw pillows for the living room or bedding for the bedroom. Using a quality fabric where it counts makes a whole room feel more luxe.

Re-edited from a post originally published 9.17.15-NT