How To Make Your Home Look Bigger With Interior Styling

Interior design is about more than making your home look nice—it’s about cultivating a space that makes you feel good to be in it. It’s about turning aesthetic dreams into reality. Interior design is so fun because it allows us to look beyond who we are and step into the home of the person we want to be. 

Surely there are limits to what we can do in our home—maybe we don’t have space for a dream closet, and perhaps we can’t afford that cloud couch right now—but that doesn’t mean we can’t create a home that is so beautiful it makes us want to stay in on the weekends. 

Some homes work the best with smaller, cozy spaces (hello, cottagecore), while others might benefit from spaces that appear bigger. If you’re going for the latter in your home, we have some design tips and tricks to make a room you’re designing appear bigger. 

Opt For Light Colors

Light colors make a room look bigger and brighter because light walls are more reflective, whereas dark colors absorb light. This effect makes your walls feel farther away, creating the illusion of distance. Plus, if your walls are a similar color to your ceiling (eggshell walls and a white ceiling, for example), the line of the eye isn’t cut off by an abrupt change in color. Smooth transition = more space.

Use Mirrors 

This one is all about smoke and mirrors, literally. We can use mirrors to become space-growing magicians in the blink of an eye! 

When the human eye sees a big mirror in a room, the brain is tricked into thinking that there’s more space in the room than there really is. We see that there’s a mirror, of course, but we can’t control the fact that we perceive more depth in the room when we look at it. Additionally, mirrors bounce more light around the room, thus making the room appear even bigger.

Furniture Matters

When it comes to interior design, furniture is your bread and butter. We have a few rules and suggestions when it comes to picking the right pieces for the room you’re designing. 

First things first, figure out how you want the space to look bigger. If the room is large but you want it to look taller, choose furniture that is lower to the ground. If the opposite is the case and you want the room to look like it has more square footage, opt for furniture with legs so more of the floor is visible. 

Next is color and texture. Light and neutral colors will look bigger and if you’re trying to create an optical illusion. Clear, mirrored, and transparent (like wicker, which you can see through) materials will create some space for the eye. 

Last is furniture size: we recommend choosing a few large pieces rather than a bunch of smaller ones so the space doesn’t look cluttered. Don’t be afraid of accent pieces (unless you’re going for that Kim Kardashian home museum look), but try to keep it simple with plenty of space to easily move through the room. Opt for pieces that don’t take up floor space; instead of a side table with a lamp on it, opt for a sconce or hanging lamp. 

Let In As Much Natural Light As Possible

This brings us back to our first point about light colors—once you have light-colored walls for light to bounce off of, you need to let the natural light in. If you have windows, consider white transparent (or no) window coverings. That way, when the sun hits them, they’ll help emit tons of light into the room.

Create Lines

We can use lines to create more illusion of space. 

When it comes to low ceiling design tricks, we recommend using vertical lines on the walls to draw the eyes up. One way to do this is by hanging your curtains just below the ceiling; you can create the same effect with a floor to ceiling bookcase or gallery wall as well. 

If you’d like the square footage to look bigger, using lines on the floor—whether by emphasizing the lines of hardwood floors, getting a rug with a lined pattern running in the shorter direction of the room—is going to help create space.