Small Space Decorating Tips from New Yorkers

Walls are a New Yorker's secret extra-space weapon. While many of us live in older buildings with plaster walls that make it challenging to hang things (think crumbling bits of plaster flying at you as you drill), it's worth it to figure out how to hang things correctly. We've learned to compensate for a lack of square footage by hanging items such as this wall desk. You can tuck a chair or stool under a piece like this and only give up a few feet of square footage.

Homes in the suburbs come with lots of kitchen perks like pantries and vast islands for storage. City kitchens, not so much. If your own home doesn't have space coming out of its ears, take this tip from city dwellers and build up. Your cabinets can go straight up to your ceiling to take advantage of often overlooked space. This city kitchen included open shelving at the top of the cabinets, which is perfect for cookbooks or seldom-used appliances.

This lucky city dweller has a bedroom flooded with natural light from their oversized windows. A trick to getting more light is building the windows out at an angle like this one. But that space created by that angle shouldn't be wasted. A custom cushion has been made to fit into the sill. Add in a couple of pillows and you've got a world-class reading nook, or the perfect spot to sit and slip on your shoes in the morning.

One of the main tenets of city dwelling is that there really are no rules. We tend to use spaces more flexibly out of necessity. Notice the room that this dining table occupies is not a room at all. It's really more of a hallway. If you don't have a formal dining room but you'd like one, follow our footsteps: Downsize your idea of how much square footage you truly need. Look for areas of your home that weren't initially intended to serve as a dining space and imagine them as a New Yorker would.