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Owners and tenants of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) share key insights about how to navigate the unique living experience.

Kim in her guest bedroom, on a daybed she fashioned out of a queen-sized bed and a plywood headboard she painted. The walls are cloaked in Farrow & Ball Inchyra Blue.

“It looks like a Disneyland castle,” designer Irina Lazar says of the one-bedroom apartment she furnished with practical pieces and flights of fancy.

Mason Ros led the design of a 48-foot glass hallway that connects two newly renovated homes in New Orleans.

Tom commissioned his friend, artist David Hardaker, to design three circular art pieces hanging in the hallway.

Kim's bedroom features a vintage four-poster bed lit up by Jami Girouard table lamps and a vintage capiz lotus chandelier. She painted the mural on the ceiling herself with bronze metallic paint.

Kim accidentally spilled on this Hammerhead Sofa Jared designed, but turned the blunder into an art project by painting bleach squiggles all over the reupholstered fabric. "It was a happy accident," Kim says. "I was so surprised by how good it looked that I painted the wall in the dining room the same pattern."

The mural in Kim's kitchen, painted to resemble a wallpaper, is replicated again in the painting on top. Kim says she was going for a trompe l'oeil effect, "like a painting on a painting on a painting." The furnishings were sourced secondhand from thrift stores and flea markets.

The vestibule is painted with underwater imagery and decorated with vintage furnishings.

Another shot of the kitchen, where a flea market painting has been covered by the repeating floral motif of the walls.

Kim created the marble dining table in collaboration with furniture designer Jona Maaryn, who made the matching chairs. A plaster and steel chandelier, another of Kim's designs, hangs overhead.

A mirror by artist Miguel Rangel hangs over a faux fireplace Kim made with a plaster and plywood frame that she later tiled over. The chairs are vintage and the coffee table is cobbled together from two antique panther end tables finished off with a marble top.

The vestibule's UV paint looks like a whole different place when lit up by a blacklight.

Plants, an upholstered sofa, and a wood console, chair, and coffee table supply warmth and texture in the understated living area.

The open-plan living-and-dining rooms display oak flooring and modernist furniture pieces.

Architects Mathilde Nicoulaud and Olivier Lekien recreated a 1930 compact house in Montreuil, France, on the outskirts of Paris as their ideal family home.

Green linoleum flooring in the kitchen connects the room to the greenery-filled courtyard.

Oak cabinetry and reclaimed Corian counters provide rich textures in the sunlight-filled kitchen.