Carving Out a Spot When There’s No Room to Spare

“We all have a bit of Virginia Woolf in us,” says decorator Charlotte Moss. “We want to have a room of our own.”

And to demonstrate that it can be done even when there’s no room to spare, Moss redid a passageway as a tiny study in the show house at the Sara Delano home. The windowless 5-by-12-foot passageway became a hideaway for lounging and desk work, furnished with a love seat, desk, chair and sofa table. Pocket doors at one end can close off the area.

To disguise features that couldn’t be moved and to create a special identity, she tented the entire room with the same interesting French-toile fabric. This printed fabric in cream and 12 gradations of brown is the most important ingredient, Moss says. It unifies an area broken up by exposed pipes and utility boxes, yet supplies the detail people crave in a tiny space.

Using a visual trick to make the narrow room seem wider, she replaced a closet door with a windowed door and hung a mirror on the back wall inside a small closet off the passageway.

On the opposite wall of the room, she created a “window” by punctuating the surface of a square mirror with mullions. Curtains at either side of the settee and a canopy above it also make the room look bigger.