Rachel Shaw

Get grown-up furniture without spending a fortune.

Or maybe even ever!

While we seem to be nearing the apex of all-white kitchens, certain trends and design ideas don't seem to be going anywhere.

Chip and Jo’s designs are nothing if not, well, a little expected. At least, that’s what I had convinced myself of. Having been an avid watcher of the beloved Texan renovating duo for the first few seasons, I admit that seeing the same white kitchen with the same white subway tile and the same distressed decor got pretty tired pretty fast. So, I tuned out and assumed their style stayed back in 2015 — along with my interest.

Few homes are as impressive as tiny houses in terms of use of space. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. Even if you aren’t living in super tight quarters, there are plenty of notes you can take from the creative storage solutions often found in these compact spaces, particularly in the kitchen. Here, we scoured the littlest abodes and found nine really good, smart lessons, which you can steal for your own dwelling to maximize your square footage and style.

You know how in every ’90s and early aughts teen movie there was a makeover scene in which a “nerdy” girl becomes “pretty,” but all that really happens is she loses her oh-so-undesirable glasses and replaces her generally tragic hair and wardrobe situation with a cool coif and a twin set from Contempo Casual and, ta-da!, she’s the most popular girl in school? Yeah, well, that’s not this kitchen (big lead-up, huh?).

Here’s the best example of “never judge a book by its cover” if I’ve ever seen one. Before Erin Tole, Ryan Phillips, and their family moved into this ridiculously charming 5,000-square-foot Vancouver, Washington, home, it wasn’t exactly, well, as charming as you see it here. Nope.

Perfectly styled open shelving? Check. Pristine marble countertops? Double check. Alright, all those thumb-stopping kitchens you’ve bookmarked on Instagram might not be exactly attainable for mere mortals, except … are they? Maybe not the whole kit and caboodle (sorry), but look a little closer and I promise there are some valuable, usable lessons for real-life spaces once you look past the dollar signs floating across your eyeballs.

There’s something about centuries-old European homes that makes you want to purge everything you own and give up the only life you’ve ever known to move to a small village in the French countryside. You’d be able to rent that adorable abode with the plentiful profits of the jam-making trade you recently took up, and while it’s lacking comfortable modern amenities, it doesn’t matter, because #character and #architecturaldetails.