What Makes a Tiny Home Cool? Apartment Therapy Has Some Ideas.

“Likely, when we close our eyes and think of a small space, it’s white walls, no lighting and bad storage,” said Nate Berkus.

Mr. Berkus, the celebrity interior designer, was standing in a bright, cabinet-outfitted bathroom that he designed for Apartment Therapy’s “Small/Cool NYC,” a pop-up exhibition in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The event, which is running on consecutive weekends this month and will conclude on Sunday, Oct. 29, is halfway between a showhouse and a showroom.

More than a dozen 10-by-12-foot room schemes — imagined by creators as fresh as Maitri Mody, a fashion influencer who posts on Instagram under the name Honey I Dressed the Pug, and as seasoned as the talk-show host and domestic strategist Drew Barrymore — offer tips for loosening up tight quarters. Visitors can steal ideas like Ms. Mody’s choice of fruit-and-vegetable-shaped hardware on sherbet-colored kitchen cabinets or they can shop the settings using QR codes.

“I want every room to be a solution, as well as cool looking,” said Maxwell Ryan, who founded Apartment Therapy with his brother, Oliver Ryan, as a design blog for urbanites in 2004 and has overseen its development into a media company with multiple branches. (Dorm Therapy, a design platform executed by a network of college students, is the latest.)

“Small/Cool” began in the mid-aughts, when the Ryan brothers, inspired by the College Humor website’s N.C.A.A.-like tournament, with brackets, to find “the hottest college girl,” asked readers to post photos of their cool, compact homes for others to vote on.