Maximising Minimal Spaces

By Domitilla Lepri

With Shanghai housing prices remaining high and rental rates dramatically increasing, while housing allowances concurrently shrink, finding the perfect, spacious dream home is getting more difficult by the day.

Do you get anxious when opening your apartment door and seeing the chaos waiting inside? Is your bed covered with clothes because you have nowhere else to put them and in the kitchen there isn’t even enough space to store a pan?

If that’s your present situation, thankfully there are two aspects you can work on. First, you can make your house look bigger; second, create as much storage in which to squirrel away all the things you’ve accumulated in a city where you can get a pair of shoes for RMB 100 and dresses for RMB 200!

To make your beloved home look bigger, the most obvious trick is to place mirrors in every possible area. This will give you the feeling the place is much larger and brighter. Moreover, well-illuminated apartments – whether artificially or naturally, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s bright – look spacious. Conversely, dark homes always look smaller than they really are.

Another good tip is to only keep essential furniture; the room will look more spacious and larger.

If your bedroom is too small to fit the bedside tables, instead of a normal headboard, build a shelf behind your bed (20 cm of width is sufficient) to hold your lamps or books. You may then paint a fake headboard or hang a tapestry on the wall.

Is your living room too small to fit a coffee table? Ask your furniture shop to fabricate two or three side tables in the same style but in decreasingly smaller measurements. You can then slip them one under the other, and just like Matryoshka dolls, only use them when necessary.

If your kitchen is smaller than your lift, simply install small folding shelves on the wall and open them when needed. 

Another important trick is to maximise your storage space to make the most of your unused space. For example, if you have a wide corridor, you can build a bookshelf library for books and DVDs (30 cm is enough) and if you have further space transform it into a cabinet. You may use a curtain to close it instead of doors as it will occupy less space and brighten up the passageway.

Use shelves to take advantage of a high ceiling apartment, and if your bedroom has high ceilings, have a carpenter build you a special raised bed with cabinets underneath.

Now you only need to tidy up!

Domitilla Lepri is the owner of Shanghai-based DL Architecture, a firm specialising in renovation and interior decoration. If you have an interior design question you’d like her to answer in a future column, please email her at [email protected].