The instinct in a small room is to scale everything down — little prints, little vases, a lot of them. It almost always makes the room feel smaller, because a scatter of small objects reads as clutter and clutter reads as lack of space.
One large thing beats six small things
A single large print on the longest wall gives the eye somewhere to settle and, oddly, makes the wall feel further away. Six postcards in six frames make the same wall feel like a noticeboard.
Let the work be the color
If the room is painted in something quiet, a handmade object can carry all the color in it without any help. That is cheaper than repainting and much easier to undo.
Use the vertical
Shelves at picture height rather than at waist height free up the floor and put objects where you look. A row of three pots on a high shelf is storage, decoration and negative space at once.
Leave something empty
The hardest discipline in a small room is an empty surface. Keep one — a shelf, a windowsill, a table — with nothing on it at all, and everything else in the room gets to be looked at properly.
