This Living Room’s Makeover Feels Like a Cozy Hideway
Brooklyn-based renter Hattie Aspin is a big believer in personalizing your space, whether you just signed a lease on a temporary place or a purchase agreement for a house.
“I know a lot of New Yorkers understandably view their apartments as a temporary place, which can make it hard to justify investing in them, but I’ve always tried to resist that mindset,” she told Apartment Therapy in her house tour. “As a homebody, introvert, and remote worker, it feels especially important to create a space I truly enjoy being in.”
She made her living room, once “basically a blank canvas” with white walls, basic fixtures, and a table in the middle, feel like home by installing bookshelves, painting the walls, and adding in antiques and heirlooms.
Bookshelves fill in empty niches in the corner.
“My proudest DIY project is definitely our built-in bookshelves,” Hattie says. She and her mom tackled the project in one weekend after a trip to Lowe’s for lumber. “One day I hope to have a Beauty and the Beast-level library, but right now in my 600-square-foot apartment, this will have to do,” Hattie says on Instagram.
And “beyond just being practical, the shelves add so much warmth and personality,” she tells AT.
The walls got a light blue coat of paint.
Hattie chose blue (Benjamin Moore’s Winter Lake), her favorite color, for the living room wall color, which she says makes the place more homey than the bright white before.
One of the biggest challenges of the garden-level apartment, she says, was making sure the low ceilings didn’t cramp (literally) her style, so she tried to make the apartment feel enveloping and “tucked-away,” and this paint color really helped her lean into that look without making things too dark.
There’s beautiful reupholstered furniture.
Thirdly, Hattie says incorporating antiques and personal artwork made the whole place feel a lot more like her. There are some new things, like her woven rug, rattan lamp, and small dining table, but most of her favorite pieces in the living room are secondhand finds — including some that got a makeover with new upholstery fabric.
Two reupholstered stunners in the room? A Facebook Marketplace bench and an armchair from an online auction. And her sofa was purchased by her great-grandmother in the 1960s, and spent most of its life in her grandparents’ house.
“I have such vivid memories of sitting on it as a kid while I watched TV at their house after school,” Hattie says. After they passed a few years ago, I decided to keep it and get it reupholstered. Now, it’s not only a functional piece for guests who come to stay with us, but also a really special reminder of my grandparents and my childhood.” (Talk about personalizing a space!)
To see more of Hattie’s home, take a look at her full house tour.