Furnishing a rental you are not allowed to alter

Most people arriving in Luxembourg rent first, often for longer than they intended, and they treat the apartment as temporary for the entire period. Two years later they are still living with a landlord's ceiling light, a beige sofa and nothing on the walls. The constraint is real: you cannot paint in many leases, you cannot touch the floor, and you will be judged on the inventory when you leave. Within that constraint there is a great deal more room than people use.

The rule that governs everything

Anything fixed to the building is the landlord's decision and your risk at the end of the lease. Anything freestanding is yours. Design the apartment entirely out of freestanding elements and the question of permission never arises.

That sounds limiting. In practice, the elements that determine how a room feels, which are light, textile, colour at eye level and the arrangement of furniture, are almost all freestanding.

Nine changes that work

1. Replace the lighting, keep the fittings

Leave the ceiling fitting where it is, put a warm dimmable bulb in it, and add two or three plug-in lamps. Covered at length elsewhere in this journal, and it remains the highest-return change available to a tenant.

2. A large rug, larger than you think

The commonest mistake is a rug that is too small, floating in the middle of the floor with all the furniture off it. As a working rule, the front legs of the sofa and armchairs should sit on the rug. In a typical Luxembourg living room that means 200 by 300 centimetres, not 160 by 230.

A rug also fixes an inherited floor you dislike and solves impact noise, which matters if the lease mentions it.

3. Curtains, floor to ceiling

Most rentals come with blinds or short curtains hung from the window frame. Hanging full-length curtains from a rail close to the ceiling, wider than the window on both sides, makes the window read as larger and the ceiling as higher.

Track and rail fixings do involve drilling, so ask. Most landlords agree readily, because it improves the apartment. Tension rods and ceiling-track systems exist for those who cannot drill.

4. Freestanding storage as architecture

A tall, plain bookcase or a run of low units along one wall does the job that built-in joinery would do, and it comes with you. Keep it one colour, keep it simple, and let the contents provide the interest.

5. Colour on textiles, not walls

If you cannot paint, the palette has to live in the rug, the curtains, the cushions and the throws. Choose two or three colours and repeat each of them at least twice in the room. Repetition is what makes a scheme look deliberate rather than accumulated.

6. Art, leaned rather than hung

Large pieces leaned on a sideboard, a shelf or the floor need no fixings and read as confident. Where you can use picture hooks, one large piece beats five small ones, and the centre of a picture should sit at roughly 145 to 150 centimetres from the floor.

7. Move the furniture off the walls

Pushing every piece against the perimeter is the default in a rental and it makes a room feel like a waiting area. Pulling a sofa twenty centimetres forward and floating a chair at an angle creates a conversation area rather than a corridor.

8. Replace the shower head and the tap aerators

Small, cheap, reversible, and among the most noticeable daily improvements in an older apartment. Keep the originals in a box for the handover.

9. Plants, seriously

In a country with a long grey winter, plants do a disproportionate amount of work. Choose large and few rather than small and many, and match the species to the light the room actually gets rather than to the photograph you liked.

Protecting the deposit while you do it

• Photograph everything on the day you move in, including the state of the walls behind furniture, and keep the inventory with the photographs.
• Get any drilling agreed in writing, even by message. A one-line agreement to hang curtain rails settles the argument two years later.
• Keep every original fitting you replace, labelled, in one box.
• Fill and touch up holes before the final inspection, matching the existing paint rather than approximating it.

What to buy first, and what can wait

Arriving in a new country with an empty apartment produces two failure modes: buying nothing for six months, or buying everything in one weekend at a retail park and regretting half of it. A workable sequence.

• Week one: bed and mattress, one good lamp, curtains or a blackout blind for the bedroom, basic kitchen equipment. Nothing else matters until you are sleeping properly.
• Month one: the rug, the sofa or main chair, the dining table. These are the large pieces that determine the layout, and they are worth waiting a few weeks to choose properly.
• Month three: storage, once you know what you actually have and where the clutter accumulates. Buying storage before living in a flat means buying the wrong storage.
• Month six onward: art, secondary lighting, plants, the things that make it yours. These are also the things people buy first and should buy last.

Buy the mattress and the seating well, and be relaxed about everything else. Those two items are used for thousands of hours a year and they are the ones where the difference between cheap and good is felt daily.

Three questions we are asked

Is it worth spending money on a place I will leave?

Everything recommended here is portable. A rug, curtains, lamps, storage and art move with you to the next apartment and to the one you eventually buy. The only money that does not travel is paint, and that is exactly the item most leases restrict.

Can I paint if I promise to repaint?

Many Luxembourg landlords will agree to a neutral colour in writing, on the condition that the apartment is returned in the original shade. Some will not. Ask before you buy the paint, and get the answer in writing either way.

Furnished or unfurnished for a first year?

Furnished, in most cases. It removes a five-figure outlay before you know which district you want to live in, and the monthly figure in a furnished let is usually closer to the true cost because charges are more often included.

Where this fits in a Luxembourg apartment

The furnished apartments and rooms we manage are put together on exactly these principles, because they are what makes a room photograph well and let quickly. If you are taking an unfurnished flat and want a list of what to buy first, ask us.

A useful editorial test for the rule that governs everything is to look at the consequence rather than the headline feature.

One further point about timing. Furniture delivery in Luxembourg and the Greater Region routinely runs to six or eight weeks for anything made to order, and longer for upholstery. If you need a sofa for the winter, order it in September. People who wait until they feel settled frequently spend their first six months sitting on whatever was available immediately, which is how most regrettable purchases happen.

A stronger reading of protecting the deposit while you do it starts by asking what would change for the resident on an ordinary weekday.

For the rule that governs everything, ask which qualities will still matter after furniture has been moved in, the first season has passed and the household has settled into its normal schedule.