Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

The Best Products for Your Small Apartment Living Room

At LifeEdited, we often show some pretty far out design solutions for small home living rooms. Moving walls, app-controlled interiors, disappearing furniture. But the fact is most people who live in small spaces rent. They have neither time, inclination nor money to invest in spaces they don’t own. For them, finding the right items to make their small living rooms work involves a calculus of effort and expenditure weighed against their commitment to their homes.

For these multitudinous renters looking to optimize their living spaces, LifeEdited has paired up with The Wirecutter and The Sweethome to make a rigorously-tested product guide, specifically geared toward their needs (though the products will work great for those who own).

Since the living room is the hub of most small spaces–for studio apartments, it is the space–we thought we’d start there. The Sweethome compiled a list of products that will make your small living room (or “main room” in their parlance) work great without breaking the bank or requiring permanent installations. The list includes the best folding chair, inflatable bed, numerous storage solutions, stick vacuum, step stool, fan and more. All items were subjected to hours of testing and chosen because of their reasonable prices and space-saving capabilities. Follow this link to see the full guide. 

If you’re not familiar with The Wirecutter and The Sweethome, you should be. They spend many hours product testing electronics (Wirecutter) and household items (Sweethome). Rather than giving you a big list of items to choose from, they offer their recommendations for the best item in a given category, e.g. “The best set of headphones under $50.” We referenced them a while back when talking about the paradox of choice–both sites help simplify life, eliminating the often-bewildering array of choices available for any given product, and making singular and solid product recommendations. Continue to their site to see their “The Best Gear for Small Apartments” guide.