Houses and apartments are similar yet different. A house refers to properties that exist as part of their own building. You sometimes have an upstairs and downstairs, but you don’t share a building with other residents. Sure, your house might be between or attached to other houses, but you all have a level of privacy that means you only have to walk through your front door to get to your home. There are no communal spaces, which is where apartments differ.
An apartment is a home that’s inside of a complex. Many apartments can exist within the same complex and they tend to all only have one floor. As a result, apartment design varies significantly from houses. If you were shown a photo of the inside of a house and an apartment – without anyone telling you which was which – it would be easy to distinguish between the two.
Having said that, there is a growing trend where many homeowners are taking elements of apartment design and bringing them into their houses. They’ve seen different things that apartments tend to have, and have decided that it would work well in a traditional home setting.
The question we’re interested in is…why? Why is this happening? Why are more houses looking like apartments on the inside? Looking at the different apartment design trends will easily help us answer these questions. In fact, it soon becomes rather apparent why so many homeowners are adopting them…
Maximizing floor space
Look at any apartment you can find right now. Seriously, go online, find a real estate website, and look at the apartments. Can you identify one thing they all have in common? That’s right, they adopt a very open-plan layout. It’s rare that you’ll find walls intersecting the living space, meaning the kitchen, living room, and dining area all exist within the same place. This isn’t a new trend, but it’s something we’ve seen in apartments and condos for years.
Consequently, people living in houses have taken this design idea and implemented it in their homes. It all revolves around the concept of maximizing your floor space. You take advantage of all the space you have, opening up your house and making it feel bigger. It’s popular in small houses, but people with big houses are still doing it as well. Of course, with apartments, this open-plan design has to be done because they are naturally smaller places. You’re trying to squeeze everything you have in a two-story house into a one-story apartment, so, space is everything.
Bringing in more natural light
Another part of apartment design that’s trending in homes is the idea of bringing in lots of natural light. Again, this is mainly done in apartments to make the interior feel a lot bigger and more open. The difference between this and open-plan living is that you aren’t really adding any space to the property. Instead, it’s more to do with using large windows to light up the house but remove the concept of walls and boundaries from your mind.
Think about it, an interior will feel much smaller and closed off if it is surrounded by four walls. However, take one of those walls and add floor-to-ceiling windows, and the atmosphere changes. The ability to see outside makes the room open up and feel so much bigger. Homeowners are noticing this in apartments and want the same effect in their houses. Again, smaller homes use this a lot, but it works in houses of all sizes.
It all boils down to the idea that people want their houses to feel bigger. What better way to do this than by looking at the things apartment designers do to make these small spaces feel massive?
Getting more from your furniture
The more you look at apartment design, the more you realize has been taken and put into modern houses. Indeed, you could argue that the entire modern interior design was in apartments way before it came to houses. Anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent, back to the point!
Here, we’re talking about multipurpose furniture. Again, apartments have a lot of this – either in furnished apartments or bought by the people living there. It all comes back to the fact that the downside of an apartment is the lack of space compared to a house. So, you have to get creative with the furniture, using as little of it as possible without losing out on anything.
Therefore, many items of furniture in an apartment will have dual or multiple uses. Take the beds, for example, they will almost always include some form of storage in or underneath them. This lets the tenants or owners store things away without taking up additional room in the apartment. People have adopted this decorating habit in their houses, clearing up clutter by using multipurpose furniture. It’s a brilliant way of getting more storage without taking up anywhere near as much room as you would if you had dedicated storage furniture.
An interior that lasts forever
Decorating and designing the interior of an apartment will differ massively from decorating a house. When you own a house, you can choose to decorate it however you want, following any trends or ideas that tickle your fancy. With apartments, they are predominately rented to tenants. Thus, multiple people will live there over the years. For a landlord, it makes sense to pick an interior that can stand the test of time and look attractive to everyone. Choosing a specific design theme might mean that only a select type of person will like it.
As a result, most apartments follow a neutral interior design theme. The walls are neutral colors, the furniture is neutral, and so on. This attracts more people to the flat, while also ensuring the landlord doesn’t have to constantly pay to redecorate every year when the new trends come and go.
Homeowners are now doing the same thing. Gone are the days where you’d have elaborately decorated houses following a specific theme or style. Now, everything is neutral in the hope of creating an interior that lasts forever. Much like an apartment, your house doesn’t need to undergo redecorating when things go out of fashion.
Walls with more gusto
Lastly, people are bringing apartment trends to their houses in a bid to get walls with more gusto. We just spoke about the neutrality of apartment design, but there’s one thing that apartment owners tend to do all the time; they add some spice to their walls.
Typically, this is done with expressive art. Every apartment you’ll ever visit will have some form of art on the walls – that’s pretty much a fact. It helps to add more life to the neutral interior without providing any clutter or imposing on the floor space. As you can see, it’s the perfect match for an apartment, and houses are now using art in a similar way. It brings more life to your walls and can help improve the interior design of a home.
Taking everything into account, it’s pretty clear why apartment design is slowly making its way into our houses. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to implement these things? The core elements of apartment design revolve around opening up your living space, making rooms feel bigger, getting rid of clutter, and decorating with a sense of timelessness. It all comes together to make for a highly attractive home design. So, more and more people are using all of these elements to create the perfect house.
