Five minutes that make a rental feel less like a rental

The specific problem with rentals is that everything you would normally change is off limits. The walls are magnolia, the floor is laminate, and there is one overhead light with a bare shade in the middle of every ceiling.

Almost all of the feeling of a room comes from four things, though, and three of them are portable and none of them need permission.

Stop using the overhead light

This is the single biggest change available and it costs the price of two lamps. A single ceiling light produces flat, even, institutional lighting, which is why rental rooms photograph like offices.

Two or three low sources at different heights changes a room more than paint would. Light from below eye level is what reads as domestic; light from directly above reads as a corridor.

Warm bulbs, consistently. Mixing warm and cool in one room is the thing that makes a space feel oddly unsettled without anyone being able to say why.

Add textiles

• A rug, which fixes laminate better than anything else and can be rolled up when you leave
• Heavier curtains, hung wider and higher than the window itself
• Something on the sofa that is not the sofa
• A runner or a mat in the hallway, which is usually the hardest and loudest space in a flat

Hard rooms echo, and echo reads as unfinished. Soft surfaces are also what make a room quiet, and quiet is half of what people actually mean when they say a room feels cosy.

Hanging curtains higher and wider than the window is the cheapest trick in the list. It makes the window look larger and the ceiling higher, and it costs nothing beyond a longer pole.

Cover one thing you hate

Not everything. One. The worst surface in the room, covered or hidden, removes most of the daily irritation.

Trying to fix all of it at once is how people end up doing none of it, and then living for three years with a flat they have decided is temporary.

Give it a smell

Rentals often smell of nothing, or faintly of the last tenant, and that neutrality is a large part of why they feel temporary rather than yours.

One consistent scent, in a hallway where the air moves, is the cheapest change on this list and the one people notice first on walking in. Consistency matters more than what it is.