• Business Insider spoke with interior designers about how to make an apartment feel more luxurious.
• Choosing a focal point for symmetry can make a room feel more elegant.
• Long curtains and well-placed mirrors are great tools for making a space feel larger.

Making a small apartment feel personalized, cozy, and luxurious can be tricky. Many renters struggle to find ways to make an apartment feel like home without doing major renovations and potentially violating the terms of their lease.

That's why Business Insider asked interior designers for tips on making a rental feel more luxurious without making big changes. Here's what they had to say.

Choosing a focal point to decorate around can make a room feel more elegant.

Decorating around a specific element, like a fireplace or a piece of wall art, can bring symmetry and unity to a room.

According to interior designer Tommy Kebbson of Kebbson & Co., this can instantly make a space feel more elegant.

"Even small adjustments like placing lamps on either side of a sofa or balancing artwork on both sides of a wall can make a significant difference," he said.

Kebbson also told BI that a symmetrical space doesn't mean all elements have to be identical. Lamps and art can be complimentary without matching perfectly to achieve a balanced, cohesive look.

Use curtains to make your ceilings feel higher.

Jennifer Jones, principal designer at Niche Interiors, suggests using curtains to trick the eye into thinking your ceilings are higher than they are.

"Mounting tall drapery panels above windows is an easy way to make your small space feel instantly larger," says Jones. "The trick is to pull your eye upwards, which emphasizes the height of the space and makes the volume seem larger. Drapes also add softness and sophistication to a space."

Mirrors can make an apartment feel bigger and brighter.

Mirrors are a great addition to any room — and not just for touching up makeup or putting an unruly strand of hair back in place.

"A well-placed mirror can reflect natural light and make the space feel much larger and brighter," interior designer Laetitia Laurent of Laure Nell Interiors said.

Laurent told BI she likes to position mirrors opposite windows and in dark corners to draw light to those areas and add a sense of depth to the room.

"In smaller rooms, even a large statement mirror can work wonders, acting as both a functional piece and a design element that enhances the room's overall flow," she said.

Don’t underestimate the power of a rug.

Aside from making cold floors feel more cozy, area rugs can also help add structure to an apartment with an open floor plan.

Kebbson said he uses rugs to subdivide rooms, and finds this method especially helpful when designing a studio apartment.

Interior designer Vicky Floros also emphasized the importance of rugs and said they're good items to splurge on.

"Rugs act as the anchor of a room and can make or break a space," she told BI. "While there are many budget-friendly options available these days, this is one item worth investing in, as it can completely transform the look and feel of your room."

It's wise to choose multifunctional storage pieces and furniture.

When creating a luxurious feel in an apartment, Elissa Hall, lead designer and founder at EDH Interiors, suggests using pieces of furniture that "serve both form and purpose," like a convertible couch or a storage ottoman.

"For a recent project, I included a custom-built shelving system that acted as a room divider, offering storage and space definition without sacrificing the open atmosphere," Hall said.

• Andre Nader sold his Austin rental due to stress outweighing financial benefits.
• He and his wife, who moved to SF in 2014, have found renting to be more cost-effective than owning.
• Nader says he doesn't need to own real estate to hit his FIRE goals and focuses on index fund investing.

Andre Nader has been both a homeowner and a landlord — and neither are for him, at least at this moment in time.

Shortly after getting married in 2012, he and his wife bought a home in Austin. When they moved to San Francisco in 2014 for a job Nader landed with Facebook, they kept it as a rental rather than selling. Their original plan was to move back to Texas.

Nader decided to self-manage the rental from nearly 2,000 miles away, which he did for a year and a half. When his tenant gave notice to move out and Nader flew back to Austin to deal with the turnover, he was surprised with what he found.

"The place was just kind of trashed," he told Business Insider. "It needed all-new carpet. It needed a lot of work."

While the extra income had been nice — he said the property generated a cash flow of a couple of hundred dollars a month — ultimately, it wasn't worth it.

"The stress and the mental overhead were drastically outweighing any of the short-term financial benefits," said Nader, who decided to sell rather than find a new tenant. Plus, he and his wife, who had started working as a designer at Uber, were enjoying the Bay Area and found themselves pushing out their timeline. "I was never convinced we would stay in San Francisco for the long term, but I became more and more confident that we wouldn't be immediately back to Austin."

Choosing to rent to save on housing in SF and leaning into index fund investing

Nader, 37, has been pursuing FIRE (financial independence, retirement early) since his 20s. He and his wife have always lived below their means, and for years, they kept their expenses low enough so that just one of their tech incomes could cover all of their household expenses, allowing them to invest about half of their combined income.

When they moved to the Bay Area, renting made sense from a budget perspective: It was cheaper for them to rent in the pricey city — and it still is, said Nader: "Right now, San Francisco really favors renting. It's really hard from a pure numbers standpoint to make owning make sense."

There are exceptions, he noted: "Particularly in a place like San Francisco, a lot of the math can change with the appreciation of property values. If housing prices continue to increase, then maybe buying can come out, but if you take conservative approaches to any future increases in housing, renting just ends up making a lot more sense mathematically."

Plus, Nader was never convinced he and his family would stay in San Francisco long enough to make buying worth it.

"The Goldilocks timeline has historically been, five to seven years is when buying starts being more advantageous than renting," he said. "Now when I do the numbers, it's even longer — closer to the 10-year timeframe — and I'd never been confident that I would be in San Francisco that long."

While prudent real estate investing is a viable path to wealth, Nader doesn't believe he needs to own property to hit his financial goals.

His investment strategy revolves around low-cost index funds. He owns various Fidelity and Vanguard index funds, including Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF Shares (VTI) and Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF Shares (VXUS).

Nader describes the strategy as "super boring," but it's effective: It's helped him build a seven-figure net worth, which BI verified by looking at a copy of his investment report.

It's not lost on him that bringing in two tech incomes was a major advantage.

"I won the income game by being in tech, by being a dual-income household. I didn't need to be taking these outsized risks by investing in extremely speculative ways. I could be boring in my portfolio," said Nader, who worked at Meta for nine years before he was affected by the company's 2023 layoffs.

He and his wife had enough between their savings and one tech income that he didn't have to find another job, but he says he'll consider himself "semi-FIRE'd" until his wife also walks away from her job.

Nader, who spends his days writing on Substack and doing one-on-one financial independence coaching, says his investment strategy has remained the same since the layoff. He likes the hands-off approach to index fund investing, especially after experiencing what it's like to own real estate.

When he was managing the Austin rental, "I kind of quickly realized that the promise of real estate being a clearly passive investment, even if you have property managers, wasn't something that, for me, proved to be true, so it further reinforced my view around focusing on super boring, low-fee index funds," he said. "I could have a few hundred thousand dollars in real estate and maybe a million dollars in index funds, but I would be thinking about the real estate three times as much, so it would be a disproportionate amount of mental exercise, at least for me."