Mirrors to Enlarge Space

A mirror the size of a tea towel, hung at the height of a painting, does almost nothing for a room. We see it on a lot of Algarve walls, usually above a sofa, and the owners tend to have concluded that mirrors don’t really work. They work fine. They just need to be bigger, and a good deal lower, than anyone’s instinct says.

Using mirrors to enlarge space comes down to that: a mirror that covers something like a third of the wall, with its centre at about eye height, placed where it can catch daylight or a lamp. Done that way, the room in the glass reads as more room, and the light it sends back makes the real one look bigger again.

Bigger and lower than you’d think

Sixty centimetres on the short side is roughly where a mirror starts to change anything. Below that it’s decoration, which is fine, but it won’t move a wall. When someone in the showroom is torn between two sizes we nearly always point at the larger one.

Then hang it lower than feels natural. We aim for the centre at around 150 centimetres from the floor; on a bare wall that looks oddly low, until somebody walks past and sees the room in it instead of the ceiling. (It’s the same height as the mirror over a console in how to decorate a hallway, for the same reason.) A full-length one wants a gap of 15 to 30 centimetres underneath.

A floor-to-ceiling mirror is the one people hesitate over most, and it’s the one that does most for a low ceiling in an apartment block from the eighties.

Where the light is

Next to a window is usually best. Facing one works too, except here, where a mirror opposite a south or west window throws the August sun at four in the afternoon straight back into your eyes; turning it a few degrees, or moving it to the side wall, keeps the brightness without the glare. In a room with hardly any daylight, point it at your best lamp instead and you’ve more or less got two of them, a trick from the importance of lighting.

Bedrooms are easy, since mirrored wardrobe doors do the work without adding anything. Corridors can take two mirrors facing each other, provided you enjoy cleaning glass, because every fingerprint repeats into the distance.

Before drilling, stand where it’ll hang and look at what it’ll show you. The shoe corner, for one. Large mirrors also weigh more than people expect, often 10 to 25 kilos, and the stone and lime-plaster walls of older houses here don’t hold a fixing the way modern brick does, so this is a job for proper fixings or for someone who does it every week. Near the sea, the edges of a bathroom mirror can darken over the years from damp and salt; a decent extractor fan helps the mirror as much as the walls.

Mirrors are in our hall collection, and at the H&P Mobiliário e Decoração showrooms in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra you can see how big is big enough before buying anything. Send us the measurements of the wall if you’d like a second opinion. The tea towel one can go in the guest loo.