Transform Your Gloomy Basement Into a Place You’ll Love to Be

WHEN TRYING to make use of a basement, many people default to dusty wine cellars and ignorable gyms. But if you want a truly livable space such as a bedroom down there, said Manhattan interior designer Kati Curtis, “the most important thing you can do is add personality.” Curtis recently turned the garden duplex of a residential building—a first-floor-and-basement space previously a doctor’s office—into a homey apartment for a client.

How do Curtis and her industry cohorts pull off these Pygmalion makeovers? Here, their top tricks for the lowest floors.

1. Overdress for Success

In the partially below-ground floor of the former doctor’s office, Curtis created a romantic bedroom by exposing a brick fireplace, floating a vintage chandelier and draping an entire wall—treating the room’s tiny, high window as though it were much larger. “People make the mistake of dressing only the window itself,” said Curtis, who instead installed soft sheers and leaf-patterned blackout curtains floor-to-ceiling. This strategy provides “visual height and the illusion it’s not a basement window.” An upholstered headboard and luxe bedding further hush and cocoon the room. 

2. Vote in the Primaries

Spirited colors can quickly rescue a dingy cellar from the doldrums. The barren basement of a newly built home in Nantucket, Mass., was shadowed in gloom until New York designer Lisa Frantz made it inviting and cheery. She painted the playroom for the couple’s two children in a favorite basement booster: Silver Satin by Benjamin Moore. “It’s one of the cleanest whites, with no yellow, and it doesn’t go beige. The undertone of gray makes color the star of the show,” she said of the vivid furnishings she chose. Shamrock-green wicker chairs encircle a zigzag-patterned ottoman. Ombre-painted wicker baskets fit snugly into a score of cubbies coated in red, blue and green. 

3. Be Gutsy

Basements tend to house the mechanics of a building—plumbing, heating and structural columns. “These things often can’t be moved, so you have to get creative,” said Curtis. In the basement bedroom she conjured, a custom bed hides a heating unit. To blend in awkward elements, she painted an overhead beam the same flat white as the ceiling and camouflaged a corner column by coating it in the same blue as the wall. 

4. Take the Floor

“Know the pitfalls of your house,” said Frantz. “Does the basement flood?” For a Brooklyn home facing that risk, Frantz chose vinyl flooring. (“Lots of great vinyls look like wood,” she said.) Under that: A rubber-based subfloor further combats mildew and mold, and delivers a bonus. “Basement floors are not always level, and this material is very forgiving,” said Frantz. For the Nantucket house, which doesn’t flood, she chose engineered wood flooring that won’t warp with temperature fluctuations. 

5. Fake It ’Til You Make It

An artificial skylight pours “sunshine” into a bleak lower-level room in a London townhouse, thanks to Nathan Orsman of Orsman Design, an architectural-lighting design studio based in New York City. The fixture’s panel mimics sun and sky. “It changes color temperatures based on the hour—bright and studious during the day and warm and comforting at night,” said Orsman of the light from Italian manufacturer Backlight. New York design firm S.R. Gambrel further energized the cellar-turned-hobby-room with powder-blue millwork: a banquette surrounding a big table and walls of shelves packed with crafting sundries.