Prize: The Bemz Slipcover of your choice & 4 Maxwell Ryan x Bemz legs Total Value: $499 From: Bemz Slipcovers are the tailored suits of the furniture world, and legs are the fancy shoes. Put them both on and you’ve got one chic sofa that cuts a dash!
“Where is one place that your cat can sit, but you can’t?” If you believe the answer to an old Highlights magazine joke, it’s your lap. If you own a cat, though, you know that there are dozens of places that your cat can and will sit, everywhere from shelving units and windowsills to the edge of an open drawer and the top of the refrigerator.
Getting your first apartment after college is a big step, and it can be both exciting and terrifying. On the bright side, you don’t have to suffer through a stranger’s Cardi B impression in the communal shower every morning. On the other side, having your own place means that you’re really on your own, you know? You’re adulting now, which means there are power and water bills to pay—and no cafeteria staff to wash your dishes.
Whether you spend the day chasing emails or toddlers (or both), we’re guessing that your 9–5 can get hectic. A calm morning can make all the difference for the rest of your day, and even though we can hear you laughing right now, “calm morning” doesn’t have to be an oxymoron. The trick? A 5–9 routine.
We all have that one friend: the one whose home, whether on Instagram or in person, always looks FLAWLESS. You’ve admired that friend. You’ve envied that friend. But we know the secret to being that friend: accessories. They’re the little pieces that warm up the room with personality, making it feel lived in and complete.
Timothy and Brittany have just moved into a new house with their three-year-old daughter, Melani, and one-year-old son, Cameron. And somehow they’re still smiling at each other. In addition to being full-on #relationshipgoals for the rest of us, they have some brand new #parentinggoals to go with their new living space.
Your reading list of books with “What to Expect” in their titles made it sound so easy. Your favorite mommyblogger — and you never expected to have a favorite mommyblogger — has somehow figured everything out. Your friends have reassured you that you’re doing fine, but it didn’t feel fine when you were wiping pureed sweet potatoes off your toddler’s face, off the walls and…wait, it’s on the dog too? “You have no idea.
Where were you when you realized you were too old for crappy furniture? Was it during a dinner party when a guest sat down and the chair collapsed? Or standing in the street as the moving truck drove off and you realized you had zero attachment to anything inside? We all know how to find furniture that’s inexpensive and not really made to last; it’s also easy to find pieces that are lovely and elegant with price tags beyond your wildest dreams.
We love macramé as much as anyone, but maybe you want your walls to be fun and functional, especially if you’re working with limited space. DIY cord art is the happy medium. Not familiar, you say? It’s low-budget bedside (or anyplace) lighting that’s colorful, creative, and easy to install. All you need are a couple of plug-in pendant lights with long cords and a few (OK, quite a few) Command™ Clear Round Cord Clips.
Le Corbusier famously said, “The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.” The right lighting makes the difference between a good room and a great one, but it (usually) doesn’t come cheap. There’s always a workaround, though. When you don’t have the budget to hire an architect, designer, or even an electrician, you can still get great light for less.
An essential element of so many homes, the gallery wall is a beautiful way to collect and display those things that are important to us, but it has its limitations. Once you’ve lived with a gallery wall for a while, it can start to feel staid or static, and changing out the art becomes a thing once you’ve gotten the gallery just so. Also, many a gallery wall feels off because it’s not built around one anchor piece. This new innovation solves all those problems and more.
Anyone who lives with dogs knows who’s really the master of the house. You can, however, take back some control in your home by reining in all their stuff. Stepping on a soggy, drool-drenched tennis ball is no way to start your morning. Instead of letting your house go to the dogs, keep it together by keeping all their toys and treats in one tidy spot. All it takes are a few easy-to-install organizers from Command™ Brand.
Living rooms do a lot. They’re spaces to chill alone, hang with friends, work on your laptop, binge-watch TV, read, write, meditate, practice your yoga, nap, and, you know, live. They should adapt to your life, even if your life happens in a 400-square-foot apartment. For those of us who need our furniture to pack the most possible function into the smallest possible footprint, Target’s new brand Project 62® does it with beauty and aplomb.
Let’s be real for a minute. Entryways are challenging — every day they’re a dumping ground for mail, phones, chargers, keys, and bags. Even if you’re the most organized person in the world, yours probably needs some love on the regular to keep it looking presentable. But here’s the good news: Even the smallest of spaces can be set up with everything you need to maintain a clean, clutter-free zone.
Target lovers, get happy. (And Modernism lovers, and small-space livers, and…well…a lot of people can get happy.) We’re super psyched to announce the launch of Target’s new brand, Project 62®. It takes the crisp, clean aesthetic of Modernism and applies it to small-space living, a match that makes so much sense. See our faves for every room! 1962 was a big year. That’s when Modernist design hit its peak and moved into homes across the country.
What’s the fastest, simplest way to update your kitchen without the time and expense of remodeling? Use the power of paint. You don’t even have to repaint the whole kitchen. For the biggest impact, start with the backsplash. Painting such a small area is fairly painless, and it allows you to get creative with color in ways you might not if you were repainting a whole room. You just need to follow one essential rule. The basic rule of painted backsplashes?
It’s the little things that matter most — those surprises that make you happy when you’re home. They don’t have to be expensive; in fact, the best details are often the ones that cost the least. The flea market bookends on your shelf, the cast-iron frying pan your mom gave you, or the burnt salmon closet doors you painted yourself. That last one is so simple, you might even choose to make it happen this weekend. Not a burnt salmon person? No problem!
We first met Meaghan and Eric during a super busy time in their life, but busy is what family does best: Meaghan runs two businesses (a daycare and McNamara Design, an interiors and installations firm), they are raising two adorable munchkins, Hadley (2) and Emmett (1), and they’re getting ready for baby no. 3! In all this happy chaos, Meaghan and Eric treasure their serene master bedroom, where the whole fam snuggles up for breakfast and a.m. cartoons.
If it’s time for new floors but you don’t want to deal with the time or expense of refinishing them, why not paint them? It’s affordable, adds character to the space, and gives you the freedom to bring in some color. Though for all the reasons to jump in…it’s entirely possible to make a big mess. However, there’s a really simple solution available at your local home improvement store. That solution is to use the right paint for the job.
Brian and Tanika have always loved dogs, and both had four-legged best friends when they were children. Their problem is that, even though they’re dog people, they’d prefer that people couldn’t tell by looking at them, by seeing the dog hair on their pant legs, sofa cushions, or anywhere, frankly. That’s tough at the moment, because their new pup, Tanzie, has a serious shedding problem.
Although newly engaged couple Cecila and Jesse are good about splitting their chores, they have two distinctly different approaches to keeping their house clean. She admits that she’s the messy one and is more likely to throw things into a slightly chaotic heap during the week before tackling it over the weekend. Jesse, though, likes to organize as he goes along, making sure that their place is reasonably tidy at the end of each day.
When you’re a busy parent with young kids, sometimes it feels like the easiest way to clean the house is to burn it to the ground and just start over. That’s not exactly the most feasible solution – especially on a weekly basis. Clare is a mom who’s constantly on the go, so she’s looking for easy ways to keep her home slightly more organized.
Homeowners: Laura and Brandon Piety, Los Angeles Milestone: Bought their first home and launched a new business Makeover: Make the backyard more inviting for entertaining It’s been a big couple years for Laura and Brandon Piety. Last year, they checked a huge dream off their life list: buying a home in Los Angeles, where they’ve lived for the past six years. This is in addition to having recently completed another huge life list item, launching their new media business, Noble.
After five years of long-distance, New Yorkers Ariel and Dillon are co-habitating for the first time. The couple is always on the move, whether they’re shopping Brooklyn farmers’ markets on the weekends or escaping the city for slow weekends on the Jersey Shore. And life is about to get even more hectic: They’re moving!
Meaghan and Eric’s family defines busy: Meaghan runs McNamara Design, a firm that specializes in interiors, installations, and furniture upcycling, as well as a daycare. The Maryland couple also has two little ones — with a third on the way in September! Amidst this “organized chaos,” as Meaghan calls it, her and Eric’s master bedroom is an oasis of peace.
Win: Your Complete Dream Bed Set From: Au Lit Fine Linens Value: $1,380 There are a lot of debates out there around bed linens. Percale vs. sateen; low thread count vs. high thread count; goose down vs. down-mimicking; Egyptian cotton vs. American cotton… It’s enough to keep you up at night. Au Lit Fine Linens is here to help, and with 35 years of experience changing the way people sleep and improving the quality of their lives, we’re happy to take their word for it.
Name: Kate and Sara; cats Jaspurr and Blondie; dogs Sophie and Brutus Location: Durham, NC Size: 1,600 square feet For Kate and Sara, finding a home in the super-competitive Durham market was like running a marathon of sprints: They had to be ready to jump on new listings immediately and get offers together fast. How fast? When they finally toured their dream home after a two-month search, the place fetched 40 viewings in 36 hours!
You’ve just moved. You’re excited! You’ve taken the online quiz to find out if you’re a chesterfield or a mid-century modern. (Turns out you’re a camel back. Twist!) But hold up. At the risk of going too Mom and Dad on you, let’s talk this as a moment to make smart decisions that keep the home in good working order. These purchases are all utilitarian, which sure, are not as fun to think about as furniture and decoration.
Former New Yorkers Pablo, a photographer, and Sophie, a designer, are loving life in Los Angeles: sunshine, new chapters of their creative careers and, of course, new digs. All that action makes for hectic days, though. Between being in business for themselves and making their new house feel like home, the couple needs a bedroom that feels like a real respite. The centerpiece of their restful retreat? A dreamy new mattress suited to their summery new temps.
One of the most fun parts about working at Apartment Therapy is flipping through all those pictures of real families’ beautiful homes. The downside is that we don’t always get to see the (literally) dirty truth. The toddler’s pasta sauce on the floor. The paw prints. The playdough. But psst…all these homes are full of that stuff! So, we called up some of our House Tour alumni and asked what their challenges are to keep clean floors, and how they deal with them.
Call it a party, a gathering, a group hang, a whatever: Having people over makes us (and our homes) happy. Do it in the summer, though, and everything just comes alive. Something about the glow of string lights and the background noise of sizzling skewers makes all of summer’s sweat and steam so worth it. Memorial Day (yep, it’s here) is exactly the excuse to put in the little bit of effort of setting up the outdoor space so the rest of the season is nothing but chill time.
2017 is the year of greenery. It’s everywhere: in color trends, on pinboards and in the real-life homes we feature on Apartment Therapy. If you’re not a plant person, bringing this trend into your home can seem intimidating, but there’s one way to make it work that’s so simple, even the most greenery-challenged person can do it. Seriously. All you need is one potted plant and one essential product from the Command™ Brand toolkit.
We get it: A full-home cleaning is a big, exhausting project. But if you want to level up your life, you don’t have to do it all at once. It’s amazing what a difference little tweaks can make, tweaks like committing to a proper set of clothes hangers or setting up a bathroom that’s easy to keep clean. Here are four low-investment fixes that will bring surprisingly high-yield results to our continual quest to uplevel our lives.
It’s a lovely idea to have a dedicated home office to keep work and life things separate. But it’s rarely a reality. What that means is that our “offices” often have to be carved out of another common space like the living room. When that’s the setup, you can make it work by creating a separate space so that “office stuff” has a defined space to live in. Make the space creative and inspiring, and the whole thing will work.
A couple weeks ago, we met Julie, Victor, and Teo. The three of them live in an apartment that has great bones — light-filled rooms with beautiful ceiling beams. The problem was that their living room had both nothing and everything. The everything part was courtesy of Teo: His arrival was “the best thing ever,” Julie told us. “It seems like every day we accumulate more things and, in a small space, you really feel it.
Name: T.V. Carpio, Cato Herring, their daughter and three cats Location: Burbank, CA Size: 2,138 square feet Years lived in: 1.5 years It wasn’t until T.V. became pregnant that she and Cato decided to become home owners. At first they assumed they wouldn’t need a real estate agent, thinking they’d find plenty of listings online on their own.
We’re helping Julie and her family freshen up their living room. The project involves de-cluttering her space — a special challenge when you have a one-year-old — and adding some travel-inspired pops of color and personality. We’ve set her up with three style experts, who will each build on what Julie has while adding some fresh inspiration from the TargetStyle Global Collection. Which brings us to design blogger Stacey Blake, editor of Design Addict Mom.
We’re helping Julie and her family freshen up their living room. The project involves de-cluttering her space — a special challenge when you have a one-year-old — and adding some travel-inspired pops of color and personality. We’ve set her up with three style experts, who will each build on what Julie has while adding some fresh inspiration from the TargetStyle Global Collection.
We’re helping Julie and her family freshen up their living room. The project involves de-cluttering her space — a special challenge when you have a one-year-old — and adding some travel-inspired pops of color and personality. We’ve set her up with three style experts, who will each build on what Julie has while adding some fresh inspiration from the TargetStyle Global Collection.
Say hello to Julie, a mom who is trying to balance…everything, really. But the part that we can help her with is making her already gorgeous, light-filled apartment reflect her wanderlusty family, including husband Victor and one-year-old son Teo. Although she loves the character and existing beauty of the space itself, she wishes it would reflect her personality and interests — like her love for world travel — without being too eclectic or chaotic.
