Stylish small apartment decorating puts the focus on

Chicago Tribune (MCT) - When Reena Amin moved to Evanston, Ill., from Manhattan five years ago, she brought with her two suitcases of clothes and 30 boxes of belongings. About 20 of the boxes contained books. The remaining 10 held art and other miscellaneous doodads. Not included in the cargo was furniture.

"Furniture is something you need, but art has real stories to it. Art is what I want to be the focus," says the 32-year-old assistant-textiles buyer for Crate and Barrel. That philosophy happens to work well in her cozy, 720-square-foot apartment, but it's a preference Amin would have regardless of her home's size. Amin's one-bedroom has all the furniture she needs, though no more than that.

The furniture she does own takes a back seat to her art and accessories. On her living room wall is a trio of artwork: a blue and black Paul Klee print, a blue and green original Robert Motherwell screen print, and Amin's favorite, an original screen print of the Chicago Brown Line stop by local artist Hiroshi Ariyama. On the dining room wall is a large white canvas with a drip of black paint across it. The artist responsible for this one? Amin herself. She copied it from a piece featured in the movie "Down with Love."

"It was Ewan McGregor's apartment," Amin says. "At first, I searched online to see if I could find the exact piece, but I couldn't. So I ended up freeze-framing the scene on my computer, printing it out, enlarging it, and copying it onto my canvas."

The conspicuous quality of the apartment's art and accessories is in contrast to the relative invisibility of its furnishings. This is by design, of course. Every one of the living room's four pieces of seating is upholstered in white fabric. Each of the four also shares a low-slung scale, drawing the eye not to itself but instead to the space above and around it.

"I've always been aware of how pale colors work against a single bright detail," Amin says. Even when I was a little girl, I preferred beige. But, then, in my bedroom, I did the walls, curtains, cabinets and desk in a deep maroon."

Amin's start-from-scratch, budget-minded, love-the-small-stuff approach is rife with relevance, especially for young people living in small spaces. Here's a closer look at some of the strategies she employs.

Sketch it out: The first thing Amin did before buying furniture was sketch on paper a plan for each room. "The scale and proportions of this apartment really dictated what kind and how many pieces of furniture I was going to need," she says. "But this helped me get even more specific in terms of height, width and which pieces would go where."

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Floor, then wall: Amin took equally cautious measures in hanging her art. "On the floor, I marked out the dimensions of the wall space with blue painter's tape," she says. Then I laid the pieces on the floor and moved them around until I got them exactly right."

The one drawback to this strategy is that it doesn't take into account perspective. "I hung my dining room painting before realizing that most people, including myself, would be looking at that painting from the living room, not the dining room. I had to redo it."

Place holders: When budget and discerning taste prevented her from buying all her furnishings at once, Amin used "place holders" as temporary fill-ins. "I ate sitting on a plastic folding chair from IKEA for a good year before I was able to afford my dining room chairs," she says.

"I'd rather do that than spend money buying something cheap or that I really don't love. Plus it starts to give me an even more specific idea of what is needed for that spot."

Color palette: If happiness is in the small things, keep the big stuff neutral. In Amin's apartment, all the personality lives in the art, the lighting, the rugs and the bedding.

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