30 Small Living Room Ideas That Fit Cramped Apartments
The greatest feat of smart design is when an itty-bitty apartment’s floor plan is transformed into a spacious-feeling home that truly makes you think, “How did they do this?!” In cramped studios and compact one-bedroom apartments, space-saving techniques are key, especially when it comes to living rooms.
Designing a great living room in a tiny apartment requires a special approach: Rightsizing furniture, utilizing vertical wall space, and investing in key multipurpose furniture, along with having tons of storage. Even if you live in a railroad-style apartment (or don’t have any walls!), you can carve a niche for a chic hosting area that’s relaxing and welcoming for guests.
From genius layout tips to DIY solutions, the following 30 tips and tricks for creating a small living room all stem from real homes within the Apartment Therapy House Tours archive. A majority of the following inspiration images were captured in studio and one-bedroom apartments where square footage is tight, including micro-sized units sized below 400 square feet. Follow along for ideas that spotlight genius tips that prove even the smallest of living rooms can still create big vibes.
1. Anchor Your Sofa as a Divider
In a pinch, you can use the back of your sofa to act as a natural divider rather than eating up additional floor space with actual dividers. This one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment pulled this look off expertly, with a living room sofa seamlessly intersecting a kitchen and its dining table.
2. Draw Attention with a Gallery Wall
Carving out a living room space in a tiny 400-square-foot studio is possible when you use a visual marker on the wall to differentiate zones. In this Manhattan apartment, a beautiful gallery wall mounted behind the sofa’s seating area naturally draws your eye to this hosting space (whereas quieter wall decor elsewhere does not).
3. Paint an Accent Wall
A burst of color can help designate a living room space in a railroad layout, as this accent wall does in a 450-square-foot Manhattan apartment. Coupled with a bookshelf-turned-divider, this small living room functions super beautifully.
4. Source Special Lighting
An accent wall or a pop of paint isn’t the only visual cue you can use to delineate a living room in a small apartment — statement lighting fixtures also work wonders. In this 550-square-foot studio in Brooklyn, a suspended pendant lamp not only adds brightness to a space that’s lacking overhead lighting, but also creates a focal center above sofas. The placement tricks the eye into focusing on the center of the space rather than the sleeping alcove beyond.
5. Lean on Live Foliage
When actual walls aren’t available, why not create a wall of greenery? In this compact San Francisco apartment, the 550-square-foot floor plan has only one set of pocket doors to differentiate the bedroom; potted plants clustered around sofa seating help “create” a living room space.
6. Hang an Airy Curtain Divider
Using a floor-to-ceiling sheer curtain divider that’s mounted to a track on your apartment’s ceiling is also a low-effort, high-impact solution for creating a distinct living room space. Since this 450-square-foot Brooklyn apartment has limited direct sunlight, this particular divider allows the light to gently bathe the kitchen behind it.
7. Install Wainscotting
In a charming (but minuscule!) 350-square-foot Brooklyn studio, creating a living room space required a special wall treatment that the renter ultimately tackled in a DIY project. Custom wainscotting features installed in this tiny apartment created a visual effect that draws attention to the sofa and home office seen here.
8. Designate a Focal Point
Some would consider placing a sofa in front of the cozy fireplace here (alongside a mounted TV!) as a natural living room layout. However, in this compact two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, the homeowners designated the fireplace as a natural delineation between the living room and eat-in kitchen nearby. Choose a feature in your living room layout as a natural marker to “border” your living room; the rest will follow.
9. Lean on Pocket Doors
This 400-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan originally had a traditional hinged door that separated the bedroom from the rest of the space. Homeowners reworked this layout in a renovation that allowed division between the two spaces without needing to create clearance for swinging doors (a major win!). If a home reno is in your budget, consider this space-saving feature ASAP.
10. Downsize Your Furniture
Rather than squeeze in a full couch and a sprawling coffee table, the family living in this 360-square-foot studio in Portland, Oregon, deliberately kept things small-scale to make the floor plan seem grandiose. The small loveseat and low-profile coffee table in this space ensure there is plenty of clearance for movement in this living room. Resist the urge to go large whenever possible.
11. Rethink Vintage Dressing Screens
Room dividers don’t have to be brand-new to be effective — some of the most beautiful options are found in vintage and thrift home stores. The whimsy meter in this 400-square-foot Brooklyn studio apartment is way up thanks to a reclaimed poplin dressing screen that divides a sleeping area from a chic sitting room.
12. Invest in a Comfy Daybed
In micro studios, if you’re dead set on having a semblance of a living room, you may have to sacrifice a traditional bed. In this railroad-style Chicago apartment, the living space is a maximum of 8 feet wide (and narrowing!), so a daybed grants more space to fit in a chic loveseat to be able to host guests as well.
13. Create a DIY Divider
The best part of creating your own living room divider? You get to designate the dimensions — and find a perfect solution for trickier layouts. This DIY solution in a Brooklyn loft takes inspiration from a sewing technique that allows light to still filter through this fabric-based divider.
14. Drench the Room in Black
This studio apartment in Washington, D.C., is a master class in how not to let a small space interfere with bold design choices. A moody color-drenching approach to the living room has helped create a cocoon-like environment that is extremely cozy (including a painted ceiling) while leaning into the best characteristics of small-space living.
15. Harness the Awkward Sofa Gap
In a small apartment, every inch of space counts — and that includes any clearance space behind sofas, which in this 300-square-foot Brooklyn studio, plays host to a slim dresser for optimal storage. Whether it’s a dresser or a floor-length mirror or a custom shelving unit, don’t leave that 2 feet or less underutilized!
16. Pass-Through Bookshelf Concept
A freestanding room divider wall in this Chicago studio apartment created a separate living space, but intersected the layout in a way that led to a bit of claustrophobic vibes. The solution? To build an IKEA KALLAX unit directly into the wall, allowing light to filter across each space through the pass-through bookshelf. It’s the best of both worlds; a linear division between a living room and a bedroom, but allowing airy vibes to prevail instead.
17. Eliminate Island Seating
This one-bedroom rental on Manhattan’s Upper West Side has the luxury of a full kitchen island, albeit a placement right on top of the living room. The homeowner ditched barstools and the opportunity to sit at this island to prioritize plush sofa seating instead — and now guests can simply reach back and place drinks and snacks on the ledge behind them. Consider doing the same!
18. Oversized Seating
It may seem counterintuitive, but cluttering a small living space with multiple pieces of economy-sized seating and tables doesn’t “create” more space as you’d may think. Rather, invest in one statement piece that’ll pull double duty; in this small Springfield, Missouri, apartment, a larger sofa anchors the entire space and leaves much more clearance space to move freely.
19. Striped Wallpaper to Elongate Walls
This 600-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in Chicago has a micro-sized living room with a standard 8-foot ceiling, but upon first glance, you’d guess this cozy room was palatial. The trick? Vertically striped wallpaper pulls eyes upward, stretching the perception of a cavernous ceiling.
20. Wall-Mounted Storage Solutions
When your living room space directly intersects the kitchen, you’ll want to prioritize floor space for dining table essentials and seating — not for storage. Turn to wall space to implement shelving that helps you avoid cluttering the clearance around your sofa and transitional dining room, as they’ve done in this 600-square-foot New York City railroad-style apartment.
21. Skip a Television
Creating a special living room space with the help of an aptly placed throw rug, the corner of this 500-square-foot Manhattan studio feels much more spacious without a media console. When you can avoid it, freeing up floor space without the need for a television allows you to really set the space apart.
22. Opt for a Murphy Bed
Tiny apartments don’t always come with a floor plan where you can hide a bed from sight. When there’s no way around it, it’s worth investing in a murphy bed. This 500-square-foot Brooklyn studio feels extremely lofty when the bed is stored away, with extra room for additional seating and even a foldaway dining table setup.
23. Create a Desktop Divider
We’ve seen bookshelves, storage units, and airy dividers used to differentiate a living room from the rest of a small apartment — but what about an actual workspace? A tiny 200-square-foot studio in San Francisco marries function and form by installing a compact WFH desk in a spot in the layout that naturally divides a sleeping area from a living room where guests can visit.
24. Source Furniture with Wheels
Classified as a “micro studio,” this 520-square-foot apartment in Seattle is packed to the gills with storage — including a chest for a coffee table that easily wheels out of the way if need be. Finding furniture that can double as storage solutions while being on wheels makes life easier when it’s time to host in your living room.
25. Use Rugs to Create Zones
In this Manhattan studio, the furniture used in the living room doubles as a display for books and other trinkets to balance out a smaller living room table. But another way to denote a living room space is to use the floors; in this case, a throw rug helps delineate the sleeping area from the living room.
26. Mount DIY Dividers
In this 190-square-foot Philadelphia studio, carpeting helps divide the living room from a kitchen space; but a DIY hack also further divides the space. The homeowner chose to mount an airy DIY divider from her rental’s ceilings, which was a brilliant way to fit in a divider without eating up floor space.
27. Invest in a Projector
There wasn’t a feasible way to fit a media console and a television into this micro-size Manhattan studio apartment, so to cement a living room feature among the 180-square feet of floor space, the homeowner got creative. When they host guests for movie nights, a mounted projector screen is pulled over the fireplace and simply reset afterwards.
28. Convert an Ottoman into a Table
Multifunctional furniture is a must for any living room in a small apartment, but this particular use case is downright genius. Within this 330-square-foot Manhattan studio, a living room springs to life thanks to a storage ottoman that doubles as a surface for drinks and snacks when the homeowner is hosting. The bonus of being able to store bedding inside has us all thinking ottomans might be the ultimate coffee table!
29. Place a Sofa and Dining Table Back to Back
This 500-square-foot studio apartment in Denver manages to fit in all of the essentials, and the renter did that by stacking the placement of two essentials, a dining table and a modular sofa. In this case, not having clearance between the two ensures there’s more space to move about in the living room directly adjacent to the kitchen.
30. Squeeze a Sofa into an Office
Usually, living rooms serve as multifunctional spaces in really tiny apartments — but if you have another essential space (office, art studio, fitness center) that you can’t sacrifice, you may have to retrofit a bit of seating to make the best of the situation. The renter living in this 195-square-foot Parisian studio had to prioritize a work-from-home space and ultimately chose a futon sofa to be able to have a semblance of a hosting space when all is said and done.