We’re proud of Home Stratosphere and love the many emails and messages from readers who love our site, but we know there are many other excellent interior design and architecture websites out there.
Home Stratosphere’s goals are twofold:
1. Help people get ideas for interior design and home design; and
2. Entertain people who simply love looking at beautiful and unique homes.
To that end, we want to share our list of what we consider to be the best-of-the-best in interior design, home decor, and residential architecture on the Web.
Please note that this list is simply our opinion. It’s not based on any empirical data. It’s just a list of sites we visit and enjoy… and thought they’re worth sharing with our readers because sharing them helps us meet our main goals (inspire and entertain).
Our main criteria when assessing websites are:
1. A good variety of inspiring interior designs, home decor and/or residential architecture;
2. The site uses quality images; and
3. The site is regularly updated (i.e. it’s not an abandoned site).
Here’s Our List (in Alphabetical Order):
1. apartment therapy: apartment therapy focuses on small interiors, especially apartments, condos and tiny houses. The site features furniture for small space, decorating and design tips for small spaces, DIY, and plenty of “budget-living” ideas.
2. Archilovers: Archilovers is a space for architecture writers and fans to meet and mingle, sharing blogs, images, and writing on the subject. It’s designed for networking and discovery, and features a vast collection of sources.
3. ArchInspire: This site is a comprehensive overview of everything to do with homes, from design to decorating and everything in between. Features and blogs on homes and products abound.
4. Architectural Digest: Architectural Digest is the web front of a magazine specializing in, you guessed it, architecture. With features on everything from modern specialized designs to celebrity homes, it covers the high end gamut.
5. Bright Nest: Bright Nest features tips and tools to help homeowners and anyone else interested in crafting and design. Features a Pinterest-like panel system for liking and sharing.
6. Curbed: Curbed is nationwide news site about architecture, housing, historical buildings, and everything related. This is a long running and comprehensive resource that’s updated constantly.
7. Decoist: Decoist is a fellow all-around architecture blog much like our own site, featuring a wide range of topics and guides, filled with imagery and lists for those buying, selling, and building homes.
8. decor8: This site is a decorating, design, and lifestyle focused blog, focusing on narratives and guides about improving your life and home in equal measure.
19. Design Sponge: Design Sponge focuses on a wide range of lifestyle topics, from interior design to travel and DIY projects, laid out in a bright and friendly blog style.
10. Design to Inspire: This site is a very personalized blog written by two women with an infectious enthusiasm for home design. The site breaks down their posts by author and shows a wide range of homes.
11. Design Boom: Design Boom is an edgy, arty take on design and architecture, featuring a vast array of features, videos, and articles on myriad topics orbiting the design world.
12. Design Milk: Design Milk is an attractive, multi-faceted blog covering everything in the realm of design, architecture, art, and style. Multiple writers cover myriad topics within these realms.
13. Design Shuffle: As their tagline says, “Interior Design Ideas: Bathroom Designs, Kitchen Designs; Design Ideas for Your Home and More!” This site hosts galleries of home and room designs in a wide range of styles.
14. DigsDigs: This is a comprehensive home design and style site with a focus on photo galleries and DIY blogging. There’s also a selection of appliance, wedding, kids, and style content.
**15. Dornob: **Dornob is an online collection of specialized design ideas stand apart from traditional design publications. There’s a focus on innovation and unique luxury.
16. Dwell: Dwell shares an extensive selection of home and design galleries, as well as tips and guides covering style, design, efficiency, and even food.
17. Dwelling Gawker: This site is a Pinterest-style board mosaic site featuring posts about homes, design work, and DIY projects. It’s share-ready and links to a surprising array of blogs and sites from around the net.
18. Elle Décor: An offshoot of Elle magazine, this site hosts a glossy aesthetic, covering topics from off-the-grid living to bedroom art decoration.
19. Freshome: A design and architecture magazine focusing on high style and unique projects. There are abundant galleries covering a range of projects, from residential homes to soaring chapels.
20. HGTV.com: This is the internet hub of Home and Garden Television, covering an entire galaxy of topics from home design to DIY crafting, cooking to fashion.
21. Home and Design: Home and Design is another overarching design site, with massive categories of posts on interiors, kitchens, architecture, landscape, and more.
22. HomeDSGN: Here you’ll find features and galleries on dream homes, tree houses, and more. The lush, clean aesthetic makes navigation a cinch.
23. Home Design Find: This site seeks out and shows off unique and progressive architecture and home designs, cutting edge material. There are some truly unique finds here.
24. HomeAdore: Home Adore is a glossy, big-format design and architecture blog that breaks down its coverage neatly by style, so you can browse through everything from beach homes to Asian interiors with ease.
25. Home Designing: This is a similarly broad interior design and architecture focused website, organized into panels with Pinterest links for easy navigation and social network sharing.
26. HomeDit: This site covers the broad swath of interior design and architecture that many of our favorites do, but with a playful focus on fun and exciting topics, like “pets that really like their owner’s furniture,” among others.
27. HomeTalk: HomeTalk is a platform built for DIY-centric folks, sharing a wealth of knowledge about every aspect of owning and maintaing a home.
28. House and Home: This is the online outlet of a home design and lifestyle magazine, with posts and pages about every aspect of home interiors, style, and even food preparation.
29. House Beautiful: House Beautiful, another online magazine with a comprehensive focus, offers interesting, personalized stories on topics like what it’s like to live on the oldest street in America.
30. Housely.com: Housely is a great mix of interior design ideas, architecture, real estate and home tips.
31. Houzz: Houzz is a massive resource, one of the central hubs on the internet for those interested in buying, selling, renovating, or doing anything else with their homes. It’s the place to find professionals, fellow homeowners, and spectacular projects for innovation.
32. iCreatived: Here we have a site that’s all about new and fresh ideas, whether it’s interior design, furniture, or DIY projects. The topics range from purely informative to innovative opinion pieces.
33. IdealHome: IdealHome is a large magazine publication with a great online interior design website. Loads of great photos, which is expected. What I particularly like is how easy it is to navigate to the various sections.
34. inhabitat: This site is dedicated to green and sustainable design, clean technology, and emerging ideas in the design world.
35. Interior Design Lovers: Here’s another comprehensive site, offering advice and guides on interior design, as well as galleries of apartments, green designed homes, and more.
36. Kitchen Designs: This is the home base for a Long Island-based interior design company. Here you’ll see galleries of beautiful design work and lots of advice on design work.
37. Like Modern: Here’s a modern furniture company featuring a range of interior design elements in a wide range of styles and sizes.
38. LogHome: As the name implies, this site is all about log homes. From building to outfitting them, the site has every aspect covered.
39. Lush Home: Focuses on interior design and home decor, trend spotting, room color and styling, and ecologically friendly home decorating ideas.
40. Mad About The House: Here’s a site all about the love of interior and home design. Here you’ll find blog posts featuring galleries of beautiful homes and more, from classics to cutting edge.
41. Mocoloco: Mocoloco focuses on the modern and contemporary edge of design and innovation, from interiors on outward. Look here to be utterly surprised.
42. OneKindesign: This is another comprehensive overview-type site, with features on a broad range of design venues, from interior design to eco-friendly construction.
43. Pinterest: Pinterest is perhaps the most popular lifestyle and interior design on the web, because its millions of pages of content come from the users themselves. Here’s the place to share and find the best in DIY, lifestyle, design, and fashion work from around the world.
44. Pippa Jameson Interiors: Trendspotting site for interior design. It’s got the latest in fashion, style, and the cutting edge of design.
45. Popsugar: Popsugar covers an extremely wide range of topics from the pop culture spectrum, from celebrity gossip to entertainment news, but also features a large selection of home, fashion, and living articles.
46. Remodelista: Fashionable design in many forms including interiors, travel, products plus a slew of renovation guides.
47. The Kitchen Designer: As the name implies, this site features a laser focus on kitchen design. Here you’ll find inspiration and product links for some amazing kitchen-centric design work.
48. TheSpruce.com: About.com launched The Spruce not too long ago and we consider a huge improvement over About.com because of it being more focused on the home and the quality of the content is quite good. The editors at TheSpruce.com have a good knack for providing key information without turning every article into a dissertation.
49. This Old House: This Old House is an extension of the long-running television programming about renovating homes. The site itself is comprehensive, with features on nearly every aspect of interior and exterior design, among other lifestyle coverage.
50. Tiny Ass Apartment: Here’s a fun and playful site designed to help out all of us who aren’t exactly people of means. With DIY guides and help finding the cheapest ways to decorate your home with style, it’s essential reading.
51. Trendir.com: Trendir.com offers a good variety of interior design posts that include well-chosen images to support the topics. It’s an easy site to navigate and they publish interesting topics that’ll keep you surfing for a while.
52. UniqueHomes.com: Unique Homes covers the world of luxury real estate, designed to help you buy, sell, or contact anyone having to do with luxury properties around the world.
53. UrbanHomez: This site was designed to connect you with the professionals needed in any specific category of home design, featuring design books and galleries of the fantastic work in a multitude of realms.
54. Wayfair’s “Get the Look: Wayfair is a terrific home decor and furniture store but it also has a huge inspiration section called “Get the Look” where designers submit their work. It’s definitely worth a look.
55. Wow Haus: WowHaus is a California based site focusing on exquisite design, with a tile-based system allowing for simple and beautiful navigation of dozens of interesting projects.
56. Zillow DigsTM: Zillow Digs is Pinterest for houses. It’s a brilliant extension of the Zillow real estate website. Zillow Digs offers tens of thousands of home pictures – inside and out. It’s a community where you can create your own boards – to which you can dig images from the Zillow real estate website, other Digs boards and/or upload your own images. For inspiration and fun, it’s a terrific home online destination.
