Living large doesn’t require a massive floor plan, because the most stylish apartments aren’t necessarily the biggest. Instead, it’s about focusing on intentionality, mood, and personality. Creating a luxurious apartment could be more within your grasp than you think. 

The guide below outlines six methods for creating a luxurious apartment vibe. None of these strategies requires a huge budget or extensive design experience. Instead, it’s all about how you turn small elements—like scent—into something greater. 

6 Ways to Create a Luxurious Apartment Vibe

Details make for a luxurious apartment, not the size. If you want your apartment to feel luxe without blowing your budget, check out these six ways to create a luxurious apartment vibe. They’re all possible and doable—it’s just what you want to do with your apartment that varies. 

Textures, Tones, and Touches of Class

When selecting textures and tones for your apartment, choose high-quality fabrics like velvet, linen, or boucle. Add rich materials like marble, brass, or wood accents. Aim to create a cohesive vision with unified color schemes. 

Luxuriously Layered Lighting

Incorporate a mix of ambient lighting (ceiling-mounted lights), task lighting (lamps), and accent lighting (LED strips or sconces). You can also upgrade simple fixtures with a paint job or detail work, and even replace them entirely with higher-quality equivalents. Dimmable bulbs and warm lighting (think amber tones versus white light) help with mood control. 

Integrate Decluttering into Your Design

Learning about visual noise can help you become intentional about what you want to include in your space. For example, you can select beautiful containers to store your items, or place everyday items you’ll use in stylishly decorative pieces. Create visual pauses by intentionally choosing how to fill a particular space, like using trays for items like jewelry, mail, or keys. 

Scents and Sounds

Combining specific sounds and fragrances can make your apartment feel larger than it actually is. For example, nature sounds, calming tones, and white noise drown out the common sounds of apartment living that many of us are used to. However, the fragrances that exist in this space also add to the ambiance. 

Drift’s signature lineup of premium scented home products features four iconic ways to introduce a personalized scentscape into your apartment. Perhaps most popular of all is the Home Scent Diffuser, a sleek and stylish plug-in diffuser that effortlessly blends in with any decor. The magnetic cover and three customizable scent levels make it easy to use, in addition to the rotating plug that makes locating this diffuser simple, regardless of the outlet’s orientation. 

The Home Scent Diffuser offers homeowners a simple set-it-and-forget-it solution to diffusing premium fragrances into their homes. However, the Reed Diffuser provides an even lower-maintenance solution. The oversized reed features a high absorbency rate that diffuses fragrance for up to 60 days. 

If you’re in the mood for a classic way to introduce scent into your home, the Scented Candle from Drift checks multiple boxes. The list of clean, natural ingredients includes a cotton core wick and a blend of soy and coconut wax. This candle emits passive scent for up to 60 days and features a 45-hour burn time. 

Finally, our Room Spray boasts an alcohol-free formula that’s useful for deodorizing a room, refreshing linens, or establishing a preferred scent in any room almost instantly. Drift’s Room Spray is safe for use around pets. It’s also a must-have if you need to refresh furniture, fabrics, or carpet. 

Vertical Storage That Elevates

Living in a small apartment requires a certain amount of creativity, especially when it comes to storage. Leveraging vertical storage—such as floating shelves, tall bookcases, and wall-mounted cabinets—can help you maximize the space in your apartment and keep things organized. For even greater benefit, you can also hang plants or lighting to free up space. 

The best part about vertical storage is that you can mix and match between open and closed units. Cabinet doors can help hide items you don’t necessarily want guests to see. In contrast, open cabinets help display items and contribute to your apartment’s overall decor. 

Inject Style into the Fine Details

The way your apartment fills the space it occupies helps add or subtract presence. For example, the hardware used in your kitchen and bathroom(s) can either add something interesting to the space or take away from it. What’s more, you don’t necessarily need a huge budget to turn dull cabinet knobs and drab light switch plates into visually pleasing features that catch your eye. 

Additional Design Tricks That Make Small Spaces Feel Grand

Incorporating sumptuous textures, soothing sounds, and uplifting fragrances into your apartment’s style can help it feel larger than the space it occupies. Even the smallest apartment can feel open, balanced, and elevated with the right design cues. Indeed, there are many other ways to create a luxurious living space, including the following: 

• Stick to a limited color palette: Take a balanced approach by relying on the strength of select colors to fill the space, rather than a mix of hues. 

• Float furniture: The more carpet that shows, the bigger your space feels, so anchor furniture to the wall to create the illusion of openness. 

• Fill the walls with large-scale art: Bold and oversized paintings and portraits enlarge your living space, making it feel less cluttered than if you filled the same area with smaller pieces. 

• Discover sightlines: The strategy behind sightlines requires an open view from one end of the apartment to the other, so avoid placing items in the way of main paths throughout your home. 

Ultimately, luxury goes beyond simple square footage to characterize a space based on how it’s used. With these techniques, you can manipulate perception to enlarge your living space visually and emotionally. Which strategies will you implement to make your apartment feel luxurious? 

How to Make Your Small Apartment Feel Like a Luxurious Retreat

Tap into these interior design hacks to fit big vibes into your small living space. In addition, relying on Drift scented home products can help you create a custom ambiance to personalize your apartment. Subscribe to our Home Scent of the Month Club to receive exclusive scents every month, or take our Home Scent Quiz for expert recommendations on which mainstay scent best suits your preferences.