About

I’m Anya Barnes, and I like making small rooms work.

I live in New York, which is close to the best training ground there is for it. Everyone here is fitting a whole life into not very much square footage, and the difference between a room that works and one that doesn’t usually comes down to a handful of decisions about what goes into it. Get those right and a small room feels calm. Get them wrong and it feels like a storage unit you sleep in.

That’s the whole idea behind this site. Not minimalism, not a look — just fewer, better-chosen things, picked for rooms that don’t have space to waste.

What’s next

This year the problem gets more interesting: I’m pregnant, and the nursery has gone from something I’d think about in the abstract to a very practical question about where everything actually goes. I’m working it out the same way I work out the rest of this site — slowly, with a lot of reading, and a strong preference for things that do more than one job.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in any of it yet. I’m about to learn it first-hand, and whatever I find out will end up here. Two projects at once, then.

How this works

Everything here is chosen, never sponsored. I don’t test products, and I’m straightforward about what that does and doesn’t mean — how I choose explains it properly. Some links earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you: the full disclosure.

If something’s broken, or you’ve found a piece that belongs here, I’d like to hear about it.