My Friend Just Moved Into Her First Solo Apartment, so I Sent These Décor Recs

There comes a time in almost every person's life when you're ready to live on your own. If you happen to live in a city like New York or L.A. where having a roommate is like a rite of passage, getting to the stage of living alone is a major milestone. After years of spending her 20s living with a collection of people, my friend recently signed the lease for a quaint one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Of course, my natural instinct was to immediately send a laundry list of design inspo and home décor ideas.

It can be freeing to now be solely responsible for everything that goes into your space, yet at the same time, it can be difficult to figure out where to start. And with space at a premium pretty much everywhere, you'll want to keep storage and functionality top of mind. While it's tempting to splurge on everything new from top to bottom, it's way more beneficial to prioritize a few quality pieces and go from there. By no means is the list below an exhaustive one, but rather, it's a helpful place to start on the journey of solo living. I've also broken each of my recommendations down by room, so it's easier to go through the entire list without missing a thing. Keep scrolling to check out the full list.

Kitchen

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(Image credit: @madelynnfurlong)

Living Room

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(Image credit: @tarigonzalez)

Bedroom

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(Image credit: @kalysse.a)

Dining Room

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(Image credit: @jen_wonders)

Bathroom 

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(Image credit: @lifeofboheme)

Next up: I'm Never Not Burning a Candle, so I Asked WWW Editors for Their Coziest Recs

Fashion Market Editor

Indya Brown is a fashion editor, stylist, and writer living in Los Angeles. While going to school at Columbia University in New York City, she got her feet wet in the fashion industry interning at Elle magazine, Harper's Bazaar, and New York magazine's The Cut. After graduating in 2016, she joined The Cut as a fashion assistant, eventually working her way up to fashion editor. There, she worked on a multitude of projects, including styling inbook feature stories for New York magazine's print issue, writing and pitching market stories for The Cut, and serving as fashion lead for The Cut's branded content. While New York has been her home for over 10 years, she moved to Los Angeles in the midst of the pandemic in 2020 for a new chapter. Now she is a fashion market editor forBest Knockoff Luxury Clothing , focusing on emerging designers, rising trends on and off the internet, interior design, and BIPOC creatives and brands. Aside from her duties as a fashion market editor, Brown is also a freelance stylist and writer, working on national print and video commercial campaigns for Sephora, The Independent, and Cadillac. Her bylines also include Harper's Bazaar, Vox, and The New York Times. But once the computer goes down and the emails turn off, she's likely eating her way through Koreatown, hunting down vintage furniture, scoping out new outrageous nail designs to try, or taking a hot cycling class.