How to Decorate a House When You’ve Only Ever Lived in Apartments

Home ownership is a key goal for many Americans despite the financial and environmental challenges posed in today's real estate market—and the transition from renting an apartment to owning a house is, in itself, a challenge in many ways. One of those challenges is adjusting your approach to furnishing and decorating your living spaces, especially if you’re going from a small rental to a large house.

Decking out a house you own can be a different experience from making a rental into a comfortable space because the scale is different: Budgets have to be bigger because you’re usually filling more space, purchases tend to be more long-term because you’re not sweating the end of a lease, and suddenly, that couch you’ve been moving from place to place since college is no longer socially acceptable. Here’s how to approach decorating a house when you’ve only ever lived in an apartment.

Pause and plan

Step one is to take a moment and slow down, resisting the urge to be “moved in” as quickly as possible. Moving into an apartment is often an exercise in making your existing furniture somehow work in the new space, which encourages a haphazard approach and a utilitarian feel. The key to decorating a house, though, is to embrace what’s known as “slow decorating”:

• Instead of just dragging all your existing furniture in and filling rooms with stuff, be thoughtful about what you plan to use the room for.

• Measure each space so you can pick and arrange your furniture thoughtfully.

• Choose furniture and accents that fit that plan. If an existing piece works in that plan, great! Otherwise, consider whether it fits elsewhere or if it needs to be replaced with something different.

Think in terms of rooms

Moving from a small rental to a sprawling house poses another psychological challenge: scale. Going from a modest and maybe even crowded place to a home with a lot more square footage can be overwhelming. Going from a small space you didn’t have a stake into a more permanent place that requires a lot more stuff can be overwhelming.

Instead of trying to come up with a comprehensive plan (and budget) to furnish and decorate the entire new space, take it room by room:

• Start with the rooms you will use immediately and all the time: the primary bedroom, the kitchen, bathroom, and living room. Narrowing down your decisions to a specific room at a time will make the whole process more psychologically and financially manageable.

• You can create a sense of cohesion by using the same “pop” color in each space and repeating decorative elements like vases or other decorative objects. Wall art that’s part of a series, for example, can link rooms even if you’re approaching them individually.

• Once you have the main rooms set up, you can tackle the remaining rooms one at a time.

Another reason this works is the fact that small apartments often require you to make rooms multi-functional, but houses often have dedicated spaces—dining rooms, offices, living rooms, etc. If you’re going from a space where one room was your office, living room, and exercise space, taking each room individually will help you envision what your ideal version of that space would be instead of what you can fit or what can easily be stashed out of sight.

Embrace space

In smaller rental spaces, we often make decisions around furniture that solve apartment-related problems, like a lack of a guest bedroom (resulting in a heavy, bulky sleeper sofa) or a lack of useful storage (resulting in buying everything with extra storage space, like an Admiral bed). But a house may not present those same challenges, so it’s time to ask yourself if that sleeper sofa or other storage piece still makes sense.

The size of the rooms also has to be taken into consideration. In an apartment, for example, cramming a couch and a coffee table into a room is all it takes to make a living room, but a larger room in a house might feel empty, requiring more thought about how you’re going to use the room. Will it mainly be a viewing experience, with lots of comfortable seating arranged in front of a screen? Or do you want to foster more of a conversation space, with seating facing each other? Or, if you have the space, will it be both?

Finally, a house with more space can benefit from larger “statement”-type pieces of furniture—oversized furniture, or large artwork on the walls. Remind yourself that you can go big and go home in a house.

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