When you spend all day, every day, looking at pictures of interiors, you pick up a few tricks. Here’s one of my favorites—something I’ve spotted in a few different interiors, and that always looks great. As an added bonus, it’s cheaper than buying new furniture—and a super easy DIY. The styling secret I’m referring to? A single long, low shelf. (You can also double or triple these up, as suits your needs and the architecture of the space.

If you’re a creative type who’s ever dreamed of having a little spot to escape from distractions, or just a person who occasionally craves solitude and the embrace of nature, you’ll love this little writer’s cabin on an island in the Puget Sound. The house is walled by glass on three sides, opening it up to the surrounding wilderness, but it also has oversize shutters that can be opened and closed, turning it into a tiny little cocoon of a home.

Arranging furniture in a small space is always a bit of a challenge—and this is particularly true if your space is a bedroom, living room, dining room, workspace, and kitchen all in one. If you’re looking for inspiration for the layout of your studio apartment, look no farther than these five diminutive spaces, whose owners came up with five very clever solutions for one-room living.

Let's face it: If you're going to have a conversation with someone, a traditional sofa probably isn't the best place to do it. But this is.

For our series about influential women in design, we’re focusing this week on Patricia Urquiola, the Spanish designer who is one of the most influential figures in the world of contemporary design. Her designs are playful, colorful, innovative, and sometimes a little bit irreverent, and she’s working to redefine the look of the contemporary home. Patricia Urquiola was born in Oviedo, Spain, in 1961.

Bookshelves are a wonderful thing to have, because who doesn’t need more storage, especially the kind that takes advantage of vertical space. But as I’ve discussed with some of my colleagues here at Apartment Therapy, bookcases can also be particularly difficult to style.

Eileen Gray created one of the most iconic side tables ever (as well as the most expensive chair from the 20th century every sold).

If you're hard up for storage solutions, you may be looking below your sofa or your bed, or above your cabinets — but what about behind?

If you haven't heard of her, you've definitely seen her work.

My little bathroom is one of the things I love most about my little New York apartment, but unfortunately, it does not have much in the way of storage. As someone very devoted to the idea of order, if not always the practice of it, this troubles me a great deal, and so I’ve come up with a few solutions that allow me to fit a whole bathroom’s worth of things into my small, storage-challenged space, all (mostly) out of sight.

What happens when an architect and a stylist meet, fall in love, and tackle the renovation of a 500-square-foot London apartment together? Some really beautiful details—and some really clever small space solutions. The innovations begin in the entry hall, which passes between the apartment’s bedroom and bathroom on its way to the main living space.

The average person spends about a third of their life in bed, but in discussions of history we seldom ever mention sleeping (unless, perhaps, someone had the misfortune to be murdered while doing it) and even more infrequently mention the place where the sleeping happens.

Have you got a spare room, a bit of hallway, the loft above a stairway—any particularly small sliver of space in your home that’s searching for its purpose? Narrow rooms can pose a special challenge, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t make the most of that space. Here’s a little inspiration for getting the most out of a (really, really) narrow room. Even the narrowest of rooms can make a great workspace, as evidenced by this interior from David Boyle.

As a lover of mid-century design, I’ve long been familiar with the work of designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Hans Wegner, and Eero Sarinen. But I confess that it was only recently—thanks, Pinterest!—that I became acquainted with the works of another mid-century great, the Italian designer Gio Ponti. Like a lot of furniture designers of that era, Gio Ponti was also an architect.

We celebrate Valentine’s Day a little differently around here. You see, the day of love, to us, is a chance to profess our adoration of furniture, designers, and basically anything that goes in the home. So this week, we’re sharing our passion for a handful of our favorite heralded furniture designers and the homes they outfitted and loved for themselves. Come along, people all over the design world, and hop aboard this love train.

Why mix colors when just one will do? It might fly in the face of typical interior design advice, which advocates balance above all things, but sometimes a room that fully embraces a single color can be strangely delightful. Layering the same color in different shades—or a handful of colors in very similar hues—can create a rich, immersive design experience that’s as stylish as it is unexpected.

More than a century before the Eameses created their simple, honest furniture designed to appeal to the everyman, a style of furnishings emerged in Germany, one whose simplicity, visual lightness, and playful geometries were a herald of things to come. Biedermeier is notable for being the first decorative movement that was created by and for the middle class, and even today, after two centuries, these pieces still feel surprisingly fresh and modern.

One of the perks of having a mother who was very into both garage sales and interior design was growing up in a house filled with wacky old design books from the 1960s and ’70s. In their pages, I was exposed to many strange and wonderful things, not least among them supergraphics, the crazy stripes and arcs and rainbows that covered every surface of a room, irrespective of walls or floors or furniture.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone living in an apartment in New York must be on the hunt for a better apartment. Since moving to the city, my mild interest in real estate has grown into a bona fide hobby…if you can call shopping for things you can’t afford a hobby. Knitting is a hobby, which could result in sweaters and blankets and baby socks.

Once, I bought a bag of dirt on the internet. I continue to be amazed by the variety of things you can buy on Amazon, but long ago, in the pages of the Sears Catalog, Amazon’s predecessor, you could even buy a house. Between the years of 1908 and 1942, the Sears Roebuck company sold more than 70,000 of these Sears Catalog homes, which were built in locations all over the country.

When I graduated from college in 2005, and began furnishing my first apartment, mid-century modern design was just beginning to capture the popular imagination. Twelve years later, the trend shows no signs of slowing down, and the very designers and tastemakers once responsible for its popularity are baffled. Why hasn’t the furniture-buying public moved on to something else? Steven Kurutz of The New York Times asks, “Why Won’t Mid-century Design Die?

We love bookcases. We love color. Put them together and you have something even dreamier than the sum of its parts, worth looking at and lingering on for a long, long time. If you’re thinking about painting your bookshelves, you’ll find plenty to be inspired by in this collection of shelving in every color of the rainbow. Above: A set of gorgeous emerald green bookcases spotted on One Kings Lane.

Living in a tiny apartment? Short on closet space? Here’s a clever way to make a walk-in (yes, walk-in!) closet in your small apartment, and create a cozy spot for sleeping at the same time. You’ve probably guessed from the photo above that the solution is lofting your bed. If your ceilings are tall enough, you’ll wind up with plenty of space below for a closet and plenty of space for sleeping above.

I love tiny apartments and Paris apartments, so a tiny Paris apartment is the best of both worlds. Designer Marianne Evennou has a history of bringing a moody, stylish look to even the smallest of spaces, and this little pied-à-terre in Le Marais is no exception. Lofting the bed is a time-honored trick for saving valuable square footage in small spaces, but Marianne takes it one step further by turning the access stair for the loft into a design feature.

Looking at pictures of vintage bathrooms and kitchens is one of my favorite hobbies, and lately, I’ve been noticing something very interesting: When it comes to style and over-the-top glamour, nothing beats ’20s bathrooms. Sure, the ’80s were wild, but bathrooms from 1920s are… something else. Let’s take a look at these Art Deco beauties. Above: This Art Deco style bath from 1929 is the perfect embodiment (in bathroom form) of the Roaring Twenties.

From the BBC and CNN and now the New York Times, the word has come: Brutalism, perhaps the most reviled of all architectural styles, is back. Here’s what you need to know about the movement associated with hulking concrete masses and Soviet apartment buildings, beloved of critics and the architectural elite but despised by pretty much everyone else. I first became aware of Brutalism in the way that many architecture students do: through the structures on their own college campus.

The Swedes certainly know how to do small spaces. Case in point: this small but stylish apartment, whose living room cupboard conceals a clever surprise. This little apartment has two cupboards in the living room, one of which opens up to reveal the world’s coziest little bedroom. It’s private, tucked away, and, I would imagine, very warm and snug on a Nordic winter night.

Like anything associated with bodily functions, the bathroom has garnered more than its fair share of nicknames, some euphemistic, some far more colorful. (The word ‘bathroom,’ when used to refer to the place where you use the toilet, is in itself a euphemism, implying that something far more delicate than eliminating is going on.) But not all of them are created equal.

This morning, I woke up to the charming banging and burbling of my radiator coming back to life. Cold weather is here! Or, as I like to think about it, inglenook season. This is not because anyone I know actually has an inglenook, or I have ever experienced one in real life. Inglenooks, like unicorns, are a beautiful thing that I have only ever seen in pictures and in my dreams. But that’s no reason to limit myself from sharing these photos with you.

Fall always has me turning toward dark, moody spaces, and this autumn I’m especially drawn to dark kitchens. While black (or dark gray or navy) might be an unusual color choice for the kitchen, it’s also, as you can see here, an incredibly stylish one. Maybe these eight spaces will be just the thing to bring you over to the dark side.