Avoid Overdoing This One Decor Item: It's Making Your Room Smaller!

Having a small room in your home might be a blessing when it comes to cleaning, but it can get challenging when you start to decorate. One wrong design choice can quickly take a small space from cozy and intimate to cramped and overwhelming. To avoid a boxed-in feeling, many designers swear by one decor item: mirrors. By reflecting light, mirrors can add the illusion of space to make your room feel larger than it really is. But if you decide to use mirrors to make your small space look bigger, it's important not to go overboard. Adding too many mirrors can give you the opposite of what you were hoping for and visually shrink the room even further.

As designer Steven Graffam explained to The Spruce, there are only so many mirrors a small room can take without feeling even more cramped. Small spaces quickly get overpowered by furniture, and too many mirrors only add to the visual clutter. When decorating with mirrors, the right amount and placement make all the difference between a room that feels spacious and airy and one that looks like furniture and decor storage.

When trying to make a room feel larger by incorporating mirrors, less is usually more. To avoid visual clutter and glare from too many reflections, a good rule of thumb is to bring in no more than two mirrors, depending on room size. In some cases, one well-chosen statement mirror is more than enough to get the job done. The mirrors' size can be a good indicator of the amount of mirrors your space can take. For example, one full-length mirror can visually enlarge your space on its own. Meanwhile, hanging two smaller mirrors to the sides of a larger decor piece, like artwork, can provide a symmetry that contributes to the room's visual balance.

While stopping at two can help you avoid cluttering your space, pulling off this kind of decor takes more than choosing the right amount of mirrors. You also need to find the perfect place to put your mirror to make the room feel bigger. Mirrors that reflect random furniture back and forth create a room that feels busy. Instead, place your mirrors in such a way that they reflect your window view for more light and openness. Alternatively, one of your mirrors can reflect a thoughtfully chosen item, like a piece of art or a statement light fixture, for an intentional look that visually elevates the space instead of overwhelming it.