A Minimalist’s Trick to Transforming Any Room

A Note From Our Guest Editor*, Erin: This is one of the very first posts that I wrote after the birth of my daughter, Faye, just over two years ago. It has some of the hallmarks of new parenthood – written while deliriously tired and fumbling through getting back to work — but I love that its main message is that a space can be transformed by teeny tiny changes that costs only pennies. Herewith: my two cents on filling a small space with small arrangements of small flowers …

Tip #104: Fill Your Apartment with Tiny Flowers.

Tap, tap. Is this thing on?

Life since Faye has been a bit too lively for me to pay much attention to this series, but James’s family came to visit this weekend and he was home for an extra few hours on Friday, and well, I got to flex my creative muscles ever so slightly in preparation for the arrival of guests, which brought me to this tip:

Fill your apartment with tiny flowers.

I had to double-check that I hadn’t written about this already. For a girl who makes a habit of collecting tiny glass bottles for this express purpose, I’m not sure what stopped me from extolling their virtues before. But here’s the thing: in a tiny apartment, a large floral arrangement overwhelms.

This was especially true in our old apartment, where even a modestly sized arrangement took up far too much of our 240 square feet to be advisable. But even in our new larger space, many small floral arrangements instead of a single large arrangement do better work to cheer up the space.

In fact, I’ve been known to dismantle a large bouquet from the get-go—using small bottles to place a stem here, a few others there—rather than allowing one bohemoth to swallow the joint.

But even better than small arrangements of few flowers, are small arrangements of tiny flowers.

In these bouquets, I used a bunch of a something that looks like chamomile and a bunch of smaller pink star-shaped flower that I’m not sure the name of. I snagged them from the grocery store flower stall down the street and they did superior work of making me feel as though they’d just come in from the meadow. You can take a girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl…

This post originally appeared on Erin’s blog, here. Find more from her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

*The views and opinions expressed by Darling’s Guest Editors are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of Darling Magazine.

Images provided by Erin Boyle