Apartment 101
Advertiser Staff and News Services
White walls, beige carpet and bland blinds. Your first apartment. Maybe you're newly on your own. Maybe you've just graduated from college. Whatever the cause, you need a crash-course in decorating.
The smallest apartment can exude style and personality and make you feel good about your home even while you cope with the limited space and, often, an even more limited budget.
Here's what the design and decorating experts say about transforming an apartment with your personal mark, using new accessories and do-it-yourself projects.
• Do your homework. First, make sure to read your lease. Painting and wallpapering might be out of the picture. Even so, there are many other improvements you can make.
"Whether you spend $20 or $20,000, the most important aspect is the big picture" of how you want the room to look and to meet your needs, says Colin Cowie, a nationally renowned event planner, author and decorator.
Consider your lifestyle: If you have people over a lot, for example, or the space is small, make versatile seating and mood-inducing atmosphere your goals.
For visual inspiration, look in fashion and shelter magazines, or set your sights on trendy hot spots and follow your preferences to adapt ideas into an affordable reality.
Thrift stores, garage sales and family attics can be sources of decorative treasures. A key piece of furniture or artwork you really like may serve as the basis for selecting a color scheme or decorating theme.
Cowie suggests scouring for sculptural pieces or furniture with good lines, and avoiding the "trap" of using too many decorative knickknacks. "Keep the surfaces clean. A well-decorated home is a well-edited home."
• Color your world. With a style plan in mind, determine the color scheme. Incorporating white furniture and accent pieces are red-hot right now, but if you have white or beige carpet, consider a black or gray rug for contrast.
To incorporate the white trend, paint end tables and other furniture a flat, white hue (not glossy) and add vibrant colored accessories.
Celia Tejada, the Pottery Barn's vice president of product design and development, forecasts green, rusty orange, paprika and saffron as trendy colors this year. "Warm touches are always very important. ... they put people in a good mood immediately."
• Study the lighting. "Most cookie-cutter apartments have harsh lighting fixtures that just blast light into a room," says Matt Maranian, author of "Pad: The Guide to Ultra-Living." Instead, use floor and table lamps with a soft glow, he says.
Whatever your lighting situation, invest in an inexpensive dimmer switch — "(Good) lighting makes you look good, feel good, and makes people want to stay longer," Cowie says.
And don't forget the corners. Dee Logan, an Arlington, Texas-based designer, suggests that plants placed in the corner should be lit appropriately so that you don't know where the wall ends.
• Scale the walls. In many small apartments, the living room's dominant wall is the main focal point — and perhaps a decorating dilemma. On this issue, every expert interviewed for this story agreed that wall color goes a long way.
If your lease permits, take the plunge and paint the wall a dramatic color for big-picture effect. Cowie decorated one living room with a moss-green wall against snowy-white walls. Vivid black and chocolate-brown accessories completed the look.
Other, more subtle options: special paint treatments, such as marbleizing and sponging, which you can learn about in a book or in a class.
"You can get more mileage out of a can of paint than any other decorating tool," Maranian says. "Pale, complementary or earth tones against a vibrant-colored wall makes those four plain white walls take an interesting shape even though it's just a square box."
Consider leaving the moldings white so that "the architectural elements pop out" says Ferer.
• Don't forget the art. "Art doesn't have to be expensive, just something that speaks to you," Logan says. "It should make you smile when you walk in a room."
For photogenic art, "get two or three cool pictures and blow them up in a copy machine and make them extraordinary," Tejada says. The resulting look is a great big picture "with attitude." Add oversized frames, and "all of the sudden, you have a modern touch."
Another inexpensive strategy: Splatter-paint primary colors on canvas and frame it in black.
Another idea is to fill the space with black-and-white photos in simple black frames for a sophisticated bit of drama.
If you can't afford to buy a lot of frames, make them yourself from lumber scraps found at Home Depot and other home centers, says Kelley Blanton, kitchen designer of the Home Depot store in the Colony area of Dallas.
Maranian's haunts for decorative accessories include hardware stores for unusual materials to decorate and build with, such as colored foam panels as room-partition panels and even Indian and Asian import shops for large, inexpensive wall prints. And salvage yards are favorite stops for architectural items such as door knockers, windows and old wood molding.
"Even interesting hardware becomes art themselves in the right context," he says.
• Multi-task. Since most apartment dining areas are really just postage-stamp additions to the living area, put the dining room on a diet and conjure multipurpose uses for furniture.
Ottomans serve as tables nowadays, and a desk works well as a dining table. You can even buy unfinished table rounds, paint them yourself and add the legs and chairs.
A pair of handcrafted tables can serve double duty as end tables and dining tables. In lieu of floor pillows, opt for comfy beanbags.
Doors are a particular favorite for building small tables. "You can find a beautiful old door in too poor of a condition to use as a door, but you can attach legs to it and use it as an interesting surface," Maranian says.
