Apartment dwellers with limited square footage tend to eat, entertain, lounge, read and work in the living room. For those yearning a separate office area (that's not covered in potato chips, remote controls and paperbacks), here's a simple way to fake it. All you need is a bucket of blue paint. Find an unused wall—the narrow space between two doors or windows, for example—and paint it in a striking color. In designer
Naomi Stein's loft, she used an eye-catching
Yves Klein–inspired blue to define an office space. Pro tip: Blue is an unexpected neutral that's easy to pair with almost any color. "This nook felt sort of awkward until we used a bold treatment to make it purposeful," Stein says.
