A studio feels like two rooms the moment you can’t see the bed from the door. You don’t need a wall for that. A 107cm-high cube storage unit turned side-on, or a single curtain hung from a ceiling track, breaks the sightline, and that is most of the job done. Everything below is either freestanding or comes out leaving four small screw holes, which is what keeps a deposit safe.
I assumed this would need a carpenter. Turns out it needs a drill at most, and all of it comes out again when the tenancy ends.
Decide which end is the bedroom
Before buying anything, stand in the doorway and work out which end is going to be the sleeping end. Four things decide it, and none of them is what you’d prefer.
The door. Whichever end the door opens into is the living end, because that is what visitors see and where you walk in with the shopping. The bed goes at the far end.
The window. A bed next to a window is cold in winter in most rented flats and bright at 5am in summer. A sofa by the window is fine; nobody is trying to sleep on it. If the only window is at the far end, accept it and buy a blackout blind.
The radiator. Don’t put the bed hard against it, and don’t put the divider in front of it, or you’re paying to heat a wardrobe.
If you’ve moved into a studio with a partner, all of this is doubled: two people’s clothes, two bedtimes, and one of you wanting the lamp off while the other is still reading. The divider matters more, not less, and so does deciding the ends properly.
The plug sockets. Count them. The living end needs the most (television, lamp, laptop, phone). The sleeping end needs one, for a lamp and a phone. If every socket is at one end, that end is the living room, whatever you would have preferred. It’s the least interesting of the four and usually the one that settles it.
The furniture divider: a cube unit side-on
The cheapest divider that also does a job is a 3x3 cube storage unit stood at right angles to the wall, at the foot or side of the bed. A typical flat-pack one from a high-street retailer, such as the Mauro unit at Dunelm, is 107cm high, 107cm wide and 33cm deep, with nine open cubes. At that height you can see over it standing up but not from the sofa, so the bed disappears as soon as you sit down. That’s the whole trick. It took me a while to see that the height matters more than the width.
Open cubes work from both sides, which is the point of choosing them. Fill the row nearest the living end with things that look fine from the sofa: books with the spines out, a plant, a lamp on top. Fill the row nearest the bed with bedroom things: a fabric box for socks, another for chargers and the odd paperback. The middle row is the one people see through, so leave two cubes empty or put a basket in each. Solid boxes there turn the unit into a wall and the room shrinks.
Two practical notes. It is only 33cm deep, so load the bottom row first and keep the top row light, or it can tip if someone leans on it. And a 107cm-wide unit at the foot of a standard 190cm bed leaves the end of the mattress showing. If that bothers you, put it along the side of the bed instead. You get a bedside shelf out of it for nothing.
The bed side of any divider only stays a bedroom if clothes stay in the wardrobe. The chair-by-the-bed pile undoes the whole thing, which is the case for sorting clothes by how often they are worn rather than by type: the everyday things are easy to reach and easy to put back.
Photo: Max Vakhtbovych via Pexels
The curtain divider: ceiling track and the email you send first
A curtain is the only full-height divider that costs less than a piece of furniture and packs into a bag when you leave. It hangs from a track screwed to the ceiling, usually plasterboard, so it needs plugs, short screws and a bit of care.
The track is not the hard part. The Swish Deluxe Track at Dunelm is the sort of thing I mean: it fits to the wall or ceiling, comes in 200cm, 225cm, 250cm and 275cm lengths, can be cut down or joined, and ships with the gliders, brackets, end stops and screws. A studio is rarely more than 4m across the short way, so one 275cm length plus a short joined section covers most rooms. A single wide curtain does the rest; measure the track and buy 1.5 to 2 times that width so it hangs with some fold in it rather than stretched flat.
Before drilling, send the email. This is the bit I didn’t know until I looked it up. Shelter lists new curtains and decorating among the changes that count as improvements, and a track screwed into the ceiling belongs with them. Its advice is direct: “Get your landlord’s agreement in writing before you start.” If you go ahead without asking, the landlord “might: ask you to change things back, keep your deposit, try to evict you”. The email takes three lines: what you want to fit, that it is four small screw holes in the ceiling, and that you will fill and touch up when you leave. Keep the reply.
Which fixings to use in plasterboard, and what the deposit scheme does about the holes, is a whole topic on its own, and I have written it up in the piece on vertical storage in rented flats. The short version for a ceiling track: proper plasterboard plugs, not the plastic ones from the track packet, and screws into a joist wherever the track happens to cross one.
Pull the curtain across at night and leave it open in the day. Closed all the time, it just makes the room dark and small, which is the opposite of the point.
Two rugs, two lamps
Daylight doesn’t care where the divider is. After dark, though, you can make each zone light differently, and that is when a studio most needs to feel like two rooms.
Put a rug under each zone: one under the sofa and coffee table, one beside the bed. They don’t have to match; a different texture actually helps. The bare floor between them reads as a corridor, which is the illusion you are after.
Then lamps. The living end gets a floor lamp or a table lamp on the cube unit, switched from the sofa. The sleeping end gets one bedside lamp on the lowest bulb you can still read by. Turn the big ceiling light off from about 8pm. On your own, this is the difference between a room and a bedsit; with someone else, it’s what lets one of you go to bed while the other stays up. With the ceiling light on, the whole room is one box; with two lamps, it is two pools. This is the cheapest thing on the page and I think it does the most.
What to keep out of the sleeping side
The divider fails quietly when the wrong things drift behind it. Three things belong on the living side no matter how full it gets.
The desk. If you work from home, the laptop lives on the living side and goes in a drawer at the end of the day. A desk at the foot of the bed means you see your job from the pillow.
Laundry. The airer, the basket, the pile that has not made it to the wardrobe. All of it on the living side by the radiator, folded and put away the same day it dries.
Food and drink. No mugs, no bowls, no snacks on the bedside shelf. Crumbs in a bed you can see from the sofa are a different problem from crumbs in a bedroom with a door.
The take-it-with-you list
Everything above is there because it moves. When the tenancy ends, this is the list.
- Cube unit: unload it, unscrew nothing (it was never fixed to the wall), carry it out whole or flat-pack it.
- Curtain track: unscrew the brackets, fill the holes, touch up with the tester pot of ceiling paint you bought on day one. Ten minutes.
- Curtain and rugs: wash, fold, bag.
- Lamps: unplug.
- The landlord’s permission email: file it with the inventory so the check-out has nothing to argue about.
Once the line across the room is decided, the rest of the small-spaces articles are about the furniture that fits on each side of it.
