Style Lessons from Today’s Small Cool Entries (Vote for Your Favs!)

Every home has something to teach and each small home in the Small Cool contest holds lessons and tricks for living well while living small. Below is some wisdom from today’s crop of entries including using customizing your furniture to fit your space, disguising your bed, and mounting furniture to the wall to free up your footprint.

Choose furniture that truly fits your space. And if you can’t find something that works — make it yourself. Laura built both her coffee and end tables herself, customizing the look and size to her needs.

It’s easy to let your fridge front get junked up with magnets and papers which can be handy to have accessible, but can make a tiny kitchen feel terribly cluttered. Lindsay’s neat-as-a-pin spice containers, however, make use of the fridge front without making the room appear messy. Their grid pattern actually projects a feeling of neatness and order.

Lindsay’s small studio can’t accommodate a sofa so she wisely created a daybed effect by choosing a bed without a headboard and lining the wall with pillows. It allows the bed to pinch hit as a sofa and makes the living room feel less like a bedroom.

Andrew purposely chose to not hang very much on his walls. He says this strategy helps “keep the apartment feeling airy and light.”

Bryer and Vanessa have the opposite strategy as Andrew and have filled this wall with art and objects. Painting the wall blue helps minimize the amount of visual heft as the display items become pulled together by the blue backdrop.

There’s lots to love about this small entry nook in Miwa’s home: the pattern and texture of the wall and carpet and how she smartly mounted the cabinet to the wall, freeing up the footprint below.

If I had the amazing arched windows Kristy has I’d play them up as much as possible, too. She placed two large mirrors directly across from her windows to reflect light and give everyone as many opportunities as possible to admire the windows’ beauty.

We’re big believers that you can squeeze a workspace into almost any unused corner of a home. Alexa’s done just that with this simple office nook in the bedroom. The rug lends a sense of separation but the space is otherwise simple and uncluttered.