Furnish your apartment in a minimalist style: Here’s how
Table of contents
Table of contents
Shocked, you look around your apartment.
What on earth has become of it?
It’s a bloody mess.
Clothes strewn about, plates that haven’t been washed for days, layers of dust from several generations on the bathroom shelves.
Your gaze falls on vases in which the heads of dried-up flower corpses hang.
WTF!
You can’t study in this mess or relax after a long day, let alone feel comfortable.
You’re fed up and you want to start a clean-up operation.
You’d love to get a few big bin bags and throw everything …
Stop!
Before you go crazy, read this article.
We’ll show you how to keep things tidy and furnish your apartment in a minimalist way so that you feel right at home.
Let’s go!
#1 Reduce your stuff to the essentials
You know what? There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a tidy-up. If you feel like you have too much stuff (as we all do), it’s high time to get rid of the clutter. Especially small items that simply take up useless space.
These useless small items are particularly annoying:
- Useless documents (old notes, expired vouchers, flyers)
- Broken electronics (dead batteries, defective charging cables and USB sticks)
- Clothes (those pants you’ll never wear again)
Not all of it has to go in the bin. You can sell clothes in good condition at a flea market, on Vinted or eBay and earn some extra money.
You can also sell gifts that you can’t really do anything with at a flea market. There are always flea markets in the neighborhood. Many young people like to visit such a market and then pay a visit to their favorite café. Or you can give away something from your household that you can no longer use via classified ads.
But how do you know which items you really no longer need?
It’s always helpful to ask yourself: how long have I not used the item or how often have I worn the item of clothing in a season? And if it hasn’t seen sunlight for a year or two, it can be sold.
You can throw some things straight in the trash: hard-to-read handouts from old semesters, empty spice jars, dusty decorative items and broken kitchen appliances, for example.
Tip: Please take your garbage to one of the recycling centers in your area to avoid unnecessarily burdening our garbage cans.
By decluttering, you have already done a lot to create a minimalist interior in your apartment. You will feel freer, clearer and more comfortable in your home afterwards.
#2 Use storage boxes and baskets
Decluttering completed. Step #2 is all about cleverly storing the useful items.
Storage boxes and storage baskets can help you with this. The magic word here is categories. Think in advance about what you want to store in which box or basket and label them with the corresponding categories. Work with color labels so you can find your stuff even faster and easier.
These are useful categories:
- Learning materials
- Clothing
- Technology
- Care products
- Sports
The boxes and baskets should be opaque. This will bring peace and quiet to your apartment. The boxes and baskets can be used to store seasonal clothes such as swimming trunks or winter jackets.
Store the boxes in the wardrobe, making the best possible use of the space by stacking the boxes on top of each other.
Drawers will be your best friends when it comes to small items: keys, wallet, etc.
Setting up such an organization system is a lot of work at first, of course. But once it’s done, you’ll feel a huge sense of relief and never have to search for your things in chaos again.
#3 Plants, plants, plants
Make your apartment green! Get plants in your apartment, you’ll be surprised by the beneficial effects.
This is what houseplants do:
- They produce oxygen. This means you always have good air in your apartment, even if you have the window closed most of the time on cold winter days.
- They filter pollutants out of the air. Also quite practical, because we have quite a lot of them in big cities. Plants bind CO2 and dust, for example, both of which can and should be wiped off the leaves regularly.
- They increase the humidity. This is particularly important when you are heating and the air in the room becomes dry.
- They are balm for the soul. Plants bring nature into your apartment. They have a calming and relaxing effect on us humans.
We can already guess what’s coming: you’re reluctant to get plants because you don’t have green fingers.
Our tip: just get easy-care plants. In Germany, there is this nice saying:
“Weeds don’t die.”
Of course, you shouldn’t bring weeds into your apartment, but hardy plants. Plants that can withstand not being watered for longer.
These houseplants are inexpensive and robust:
- Cacti
- aloe vera
- Bow hemp
- Lucky feather
- Rubber tree
A few are enough, but there shouldn’t be too many in an apartment. Otherwise you’ll end up living in a jungle with dense foliage. 😀
#4 Optimize lighting
Light makes a huge difference to the minimalist interior of your apartment. With just a few tricks, you can show your apartment in a completely new light. Wow, that was a bad pun… Let’s stick to the topic 😉
The most important tip: use indirect light to make your apartment feel homely.
These are particularly pleasant light sources:
- Floor lamps with upward-directed light
- Salt stone lamps for the bedside table and bathroom
- LED strips that you can stick to shelves or under furniture
- Table lamps with a matt lampshade for your desk
You can find great lamps online, in furniture stores or at flea markets. Sounds like a destination, doesn’t it?
The combination of these lamps will make you feel comfortable and cozy within your four walls. A good table lamp helps you to concentrate at your desk even in the darker months of the year.
You can have even more influence on the lighting mood in your apartment with dimmable lamps.
Remember, however, that less is more. It doesn’t take a lot of lamps to create a feel-good effect in an apartment, but rather the right lamps in the right places. After all, we want to keep your interior minimalist, right?
Well then, let’s move on to the next tip.
#5 Decoration – but discreet
Bare walls are boring. How about a photo collage or a cool print instead? It’s all great, but use decorations discreetly.
This also applies to souvenirs, mirrors, picture frames, vases, jewelry and seasonal decorations (Christmas, Easter, etc.). If you overdo it, you’ll soon have the problem of clutter in your apartment again.
This is the right way to handle decorations:
- Few high-quality items: Every item in your apartment is an eye-catcher. That’s why it’s better to only have a few of them visible in your surroundings so as not to be distracted by too much clutter. Go for high-quality and natural materials such as wood or glass.
- Clear lines and shapes: Paintings by Jackson Pollock look cool. But do reprints of them fit into an apartment with minimalist furnishings? Not in our opinion. Instead, opt for clear, calm images, such as landscapes.
- Go for neutral colors: Beige, grey, white and black are more pleasant for our eyes than bright colors. Therefore, use subtle colors for your decoration.
- Use functional decorations: It’s smart and minimalist to use functional objects such as lamps or bowls as decorations. This allows you to use the space in your apartment as effectively as possible.
Decoration has its place in an apartment, but it shouldn’t get out of hand. Less is more: that’s the most important rule of minimalism.
#6 Keeping order
Instead of big tidying days where you spend hours cleaning, it’s better to do something every day. This way, you can ensure that your apartment stays clean and tidy as part of your daily routine. You will soon notice that the small, regular touches will make you feel completely at home.
This daily task also includes regularly throwing away things that sneak back into your life: badly aged greeting cards, receipts, stuff like that. Get rid of them!
Use study breaks to clean the bathroom or clear away the dishes. This will get you away from your desk and get you moving, killing several birds with one stone.
If you manage to keep things tidy, you’ll also create clear structures that will give you more clarity in your head. Suddenly, topics such as time management become interesting for you.
More articles in our blog
Do you feel comfortable in your clean, tidy apartment? Great!
Then you can now take off in other areas to make your life more beautiful, easier and more successful:
- Become productive with these AI tools
- This brainfood will turn you into an over-roaster
- Never spend hours in the kitchen again: Discover easy quick recipes and particularly healthy dishes
In our experience, once you’ve experienced mini-minimalism and its benefits, you’ll really want to clean up. This summer, for example, we carried out our clean-up campaign in Berlin’s Viktoriapark.
And we continue to volunteer, as you will soon find out in our blog. So it’s worth checking in regularly. 😉
Ahoy and see you soon,
Your Staytoo team