The folks at IKEA seem to have a knack for making pieces that are incredibly simple and also fit into all different kinds of interiors. They’re like the little black dresses of design. Case in point: the IKEA PS cabinet, which looks like a school locker and a credenza had a baby and somehow, despite its somewhat industrial appearance, is just the right thing for all kinds of spaces. And the best thing? It costs less than $100.

When furnishing a small space, it would seem to make sense to pick pieces that are small. After all, you don’t want to overwhelm the room with bulky, oversize furniture. But there’s one big exception: the sofa. In most living rooms, the sofa is the biggest piece of furniture, and the biggest design statement, and a larger sofa (that still fits comfortably in the room, of course) can help to visually expand the boundaries of the space.

Tiny houses are charming, and a great way to simplify and streamline your life—but the tradeoff, for many tiny house designs, is having to struggle up a ladder at night to reach your tiny peaked loft bedroom. Forget where you are in the morning, and you may just whack your head on the tiny adorable roof of your tiny adorable home. But the Escher, a creation of New Frontier Tiny Homes, takes a different approach: it has a bedroom you’d actually want to wake up in.

A look into the history of a particularly weird old trend.

The days of coordinating your TP to your bathroom are over. Here's why.

Of course, before mid-century modern there was shabby chic, and before that there was that awful oversize Tuscan villa-esque furniture that looked like it was made for giants, but no style has had quite the staying power that mid-century modern has. When I graduated college, in 2005, we were talking about it, and 13 years later, we still are. This, of course, means that people like me are always trying to predict what “the next” MCM is. Is it Italian Modernism? Is it Victoriana?

Although our generation sometimes acts like they invented the Tiny House, the idea has been kicking around essentially since the invention of the house itself, to be periodically rediscovered by people enamored with returning to a simpler existence. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau, who was then 28, began what would be a 2-year experiment in living simply and retreating (well, mostly) from society and its materialistic ills. He moved to the shores of Walden Pond, and built himself a tiny house.

In the third chapter of Wuthering Heights”, the narrator, finding himself at the manor house of the same name, describes a room with a curious kind of bed: The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a clothes-press, and a large oak case, with squares cut out near the top resembling coach windows.

One of the most pressing challenges of living in a small home is: where are you gonna put all your stuff?

In my dreams, I retreat to a cabin somewhere remote, perhaps the Welsh countryside. My cabin is austere yet beautiful, spare yet luxurious in its sparse beauty. In it, I think spare yet beautiful thoughts, and commit them to paper (always paper), like some modern-day Thoreau, but with more elevated taste. Slate-clad, my cabin stands out against the wilderness, like the simplicity of my new life against the chaos of the world. This is that cabin.

If you’ve ever been curious about what it would be like to live in a tiny house, but aren’t ready to give up your normal-sized house just yet, we’ve got good news for you. In a number of locations across the country, from New York to California, you can find tiny houses that are available to rent for vacations or weekend getaways, so you can try tiny house living on for size.

A divider doesn't need to be just a wall, or just a screen—it can be so much more.

Long ago, before anybody had even dreamed of the internet, people did their holiday shopping in a charmingly analog way: by scoping out gifts in store windows. Then, in 1883, the smart folks at the Macy’s department store in New York City realized that they could draw even more people to their store windows by putting on a show.

These get our vote for stylish space savers.

Say goodbye to the tree skirt and hello to this unexpected accessory.

One of the challenges of living in a small apartment is trying to figure out how to fit everything you need into a small bedroom. Fitting everything in, plus the bed (which is pretty essential) can feel nearly impossible, so we’ve rounded up five small bedrooms that make very efficient use of their small footprints—plus ideas you can steal from each one. The bedroom above, from Hemnet via Apartment Therapy, is a perfect example of small-space efficiency.

Is this the look that's destined to be all over design blogs in two to five years? Or just a flash in the pan?

As someone who used to work as an architect and now writes about small spaces, I love seeing how a clever design can completely transform a tiny space. At first glance, this little Italian apartment did not seem very promising. Its 317 square feet (29.5 square meters) were awkwardly chopped up into a tiny bedroom, barely large enough for a bed, an oddly placed bathroom, and a combination living room/dining room/kitchen that was strangely shaped and a bit cavernous.

As a person who writes content for the internet, I am uncomfortably familiar with the lengths people will go to to entice people to click on their content. “X is the new Y” is a well-trod and reliable formula. Because who wouldn’t want to know what’s new? So when I saw the first flurry of articles crowning something called “Gen Z Yellow” the new Millennial Pink, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a little bit. Another day, another trend piece.

Let's focus on another time-honored living room pastime: conversation.

When I started my hunt for the perfect tiny New York apartment, I knew that it would probably come with a tiny kitchen, too. I got lucky: my kitchen actually has a full-sized fridge, and it even has an oven. (Yes, there are people in New York who are paying lots and lots of money to rent apartments with no oven.) And while my kitchen is small—it only has two and a half feet of counter space—I saw others that were even smaller.

You’ve probably noticed that Halloween decorations have seen a definite uptick in recent years. When I was a kid, the decorations in our neighborhood were limited to jack-o-lanterns on front porches, and maybe the occasional skeleton or creepy spider web. Now, it’s not unusual to see entire neighborhoods decked out in black, with witches, faux graveyards, and even Halloween lights. How did we get here?

If you’ve ever lived in a particularly small space, especially a studio apartment, you may have noticed that your bed takes up a significant portion of your square footage. Some people choose to loft their bed to open up floor space, but this strategy is not without its own problems.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that one of the keys to a well-functioning, uncluttered home is having an entryway that works well. It’s a spot to gather up all the things that you’ll need when you go out into the world, and also a sort of buffer zone to keep unwanted clutter from entering your home. Maxwell has really explored this with his idea of the landing strip, which is worth checking out.