The Great Room Divide

Space is a valuable commodity, and making the best use of that space is a valuable skill. Whether you’re a college student in close quarters, or living in a wide-open city loft, dividing up your square footage for optimum functionality and intimate comfort is vital.

Don’t you just love visiting the showroom floor at IKEA and being inspired by how they take the smallest spaces and organize them in the most intelligent ways? We do! (We admit the 99-cent soft serve cones at checkout don’t hurt.) However, we don’t feel that you have to be a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Scandinavian design wizard to achieve the same results at home.

Dividing up a space can be a wonderful way to add extra surface area to an otherwise four-walled room or to simply create multiple “rooms” out of one. There are plenty of ways to do it, using a variety of methods and materials of division.

Here are just a few examples …

Curtain Room Dividers

Photo: Apartment Therapy

Coming home to a beautiful, expansive loft can give you a real sense of freedom. We think lots of open space is pretty darn cool, but what happens when you have people over and in the rush of morning madness, you forget to make your bed? We suggest creating a separate bedroom by hanging up a curtain divider.

Photo: Apartment Therapy 

The above example is even cozier! We love how this curtained-off bedroom feels a little bit like a lair – imagine slinking into bed at the end of a long day and drawing soft fabric shut around you. Yes, please!

Rope Room Divider

Photo: Life Hacker

The great room divide? How about the great rope divide! We think this idea is both super stylish and fundamentally functional. Apart from the fact that it just looks so cool, using rope to build a visually penetrable wall means you get to create the feeling of divided areas, without sacrificing a vast sense of space.

Glass Pane Room Divider

Photo: Be Mine Interior Design

Much like the rope divider, this wall of windows is a reminder that the materials with which you divvy up a space needn’t be solid or opaque. In fact, if you happen to be dealing with smaller living quarters, keeping your room dividers see-through, or at least partially see-through, prevents you from ever having that cramped, closed-in feeling.

Gallery Wall Room Divider

Photo: Pop Sugar

We’re also big fans of building gallery-like areas in your home. If you happen to be a bit of a collector, adding in a free-standing wall to cover with your prized possessions means the walls do double duty.  If you don’t have enough space, create more!

Bookcase Room Divider

Photo: Frenchy Fancy

And as we round out this collection of unique and interesting room dividers, we find the most enriching example thus far. Create a wall of knowledge, of words, and of wisdom. A tall, freestanding bookcase means that not only do you get to cordon off an area, you also build a storage unit to house all the things you hold most dear.

Compartmentalizing your apartment doesn’t need to make you feel claustrophobic – quite the opposite actually. Creative room dividing can open up your abode to limitless opportunities for space. Now, time to divide and conquer!