5 Quarantine-Friendly Design Tips to Enhance Your Home

By Sophia Martinson

Home, sweet home.

Depending on your current situation, the phrase might strike you as delightfully appropriate or painfully ironic. Either way, the truth is that for most of us — for better or worse — the vast majority of our working and resting hours are now spent at the kitchen table, on the living room couch, or somewhere in between.

While COVID-19 quarantine life might feel restricting at times, it has also been a ripe opportunity for many of us to delve into a host of home-improvement projects, from reorganizing the kitchen cabinets to sprucing up the garden. For those dreaming of giving that kitchen nook or living room wall a bit more personality, now also seems like the perfect time — but it’s hard to know where to begin.

Fortunately, tastefully transforming a room requires neither a big budget nor elaborate skill. Paula Caravelli, an award-winning interior designer and co-founder of the design firm Paula + Martha, is an expert at using simple and practical ways to make a living space welcoming, comfortable, and classy. Here are five of her tips to upgrade your home without a major renovation.

1. Make it personal

It might seem like a room makeover project would invoke some standard rule about art, furniture, or decor, but the real key to creating a fabulous living space is to put as much you into the design as possible. “Creating unique, personalized spaces is the goal of all designers,” Caravelli wrote via email. Her favorite way to personalize a space is with art. “It reflects the personality of the owner and sets the tone for the rest of the space.”

Start by asking yourself some basic questions about preference. Do you and your family like modern art, or do you favor a more classical style? Do you like displaying family portraits or homemade art? What’s your take on collages or photography? If you find that the frames currently on the wall don’t match those preferences, it might be time for some replacements.

Caravelli also suggests using family collections, heirlooms, or even furniture to make a room your own. Move grandma’s antique serving platter from the kitchen drawer to a display shelf, or refinish an old chair for the front hall, and suddenly you’ve enlivened a room with some history.

The living room in Caravelli’s New York apartment features a family photo collage wall, a mixture of art and memory to make this space truly personal.

2. Establish focal points

What better way to freshen up your rooms than to make them more inviting? To do that, you can use a handy tool that is widely popular in the interior design world: the focal point.

“Focal points lead us into and through spaces and create excitement in the process,” says Caravelli. “As you enter, you see something ahead that calls you to look closer.” A focal point could be a large painting, a window with a pleasant view, a lush potted plant, or anything else that catches the eye.

By placing several different ones throughout your home, you establish a series of markers to guide your viewers from one space to another. “Often, a focal point will lead you into the major rooms of the house,” adds Caravelli. “Focal points are also useful within a room to focus your attention on a feature wall or element.”

The best part about this tip is that it goes hand-in-hand with the previous one: You can make it as personal as possible.

This bright red sculpture in a St. Helena island residence that Caravelli helped design serves as the perfect focal point to pull visitors through the neutral toned hall.

3. Guide your lighting

It’s generally believed that a well-lit room is a pleasant one, but is there such a thing as too much light? And how to choose between bright ceiling lights and soft standing lamps? Again, Caravelli thinks personal preference is central, but she does have some ideas about how to maximize light’s potential.

For rooms with lots of natural light her favorite tactic is to hang sheer window curtains. This softens the sunlight without blocking it entirely. It also fills the room with a pleasant glow instead of projecting boxy window squares on the floor.

When it comes to artificial lighting, Caravelli suggests directing it toward items rather than just the floor. You can do this by shifting the direction of your ceiling lights if they’re adjustable or positioning lamps nearby your chosen features. Again, this avoids random pools of light from gathering on the floor, and it can also help you highlight your focal points.

To control the light pouring through the big windows in this Vermont living room, Paula hung sheer curtains for a softening effect.

4. Erase the clutter

If there’s one thing that makes a room unpleasant, it’s clutter. The tidier and simpler a room looks, the more physical and mental breathing space it gives its inhabitants. To reach this state of tranquil beauty, Caravelli’s first step is to “edit” a room’s contents. Do you really need that stack of magazines? And maybe one giant blanket is better than two. As is often the case, less is more.

Once you’re done editing, you’ll inevitably still have things you wish you could toss. The file cabinet might be necessary, but it isn’t pretty. Caravelli’s solution: find a creative way to hide the remaining eyesores. In her own apartment in New York City, she masked the file cabinet and printer in her bedroom by tucking them behind a floor-length window curtain.

You can also use extra drawers, room dividers, or even furniture to hide your extra items. With any of these assistants, you can walk into a room without being distracted by office supplies or other unattractive things — and instead enjoy the view of a comfortable, relaxing environment.

The sheer curtain in Caravelli’s bedroom hides her office storage to create a simple, tranquil environment.

5. Expand with color

When it comes to small spaces, such as cozy bathrooms and bedrooms, that don’t offer much opportunity for focal points or creative lighting, there’s still room for an enhancement. In fact, Caravelli often finds that the tiniest rooms present the biggest opportunities for coloring. “Unless there are incredible doors, moldings, or a tall ceiling, I often paint the walls, ceiling, and all trim in the same color,” she says. “It visually enlarges the space as it blurs the demarcation between wall and ceiling and focuses one’s attention on the artwork and/or furnishings.”

Taking on a paint project could be daunting, but for those who want to try, a small room is the perfect first step, since it offers a manageable scale and some of the most satisfying results. Why not transform the half bathroom into a cool green bubble? Or a popping red burst of energy? There is no limit to the kinds of colorful surprises you can hide within a little room.

Caravelli also suggests avoiding small patterns in small spaces to prevent them from feeling too cramped. “A wide stripe carpet on the floor can make a narrow room look wider, and large scale artwork makes a small room feel grander,” she says.

In other words, when you’re working with a small space, think big.

By enveloping this tiny bedroom in a soothing sky blue, carpeting it with wide stripes, and hanging a large scale painting, Paula + Martha made this tiny bedroom a dominant presence at the 2005 Kips Show House.

Thanks to the endless possibilities these five strategies offer, quarantine days need not be so tiresome after all. With a little time, effort, and expert advice on-hand, any of us can enhance the beauty of those places we love to call home.

Sophia Martinson is a writer whose work has appeared in USA Today, Angelus News, Verily Magazine, The New Criterion, and The Washington Examiner. Sophia worked as an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard and then as a research assistant in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. She currently lives in New York City with her husband.