The best part of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the opportunity to curate a whole island to fit your personal aesthetic. You are provided with every tool you can imagine to do this with, including the ability to change the landscape, rivers, and natural fauna!RELATED: The Best Nintendo Switch Games For KidsAfter adding the major features of your island, you'll probably be left with a few spaces in the nooks and crannies (pun intended) that you don't think are big enough to fit anything. We're here to inspire you with ten design ideas to fill those empty holes in your heart island.Updated May 5, 2022 by Gabrielle Huston: Still trying to fill some little holes in your island to make it perfect? We've got you covered. This article has been updated with a few new suggestions and tons of new images to give you as much inspiration as possible for those little places you just can't figure out!

12 Add A Garden

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Gardens

Teeny gardens are a perfect addition to any island, especially ones going for a cottage-core theme. Plus, with all the food added in the 2.0 update to Animal Crossing New Horizons, you've got plenty of theme options! Sugarcane? Done. Potatoes? Done. Carrots? Done.

It doesn't hurt that there are tons of garden-themed items in the game that would go perfectly around the borders of your garden for extra space-filler. Just in the examples above by @nookincmama (left) and @Opal_OakOasis (right) on Twitter, you can see things like...

  • Beehives
  • Barrels
  • Pinecones
  • Wells
  • Log Stakes
  • Bug models
  • Buckets
  • Signposts

... and more!

11 Floating Islands

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Floating Island Examples

Teeny floating islands are a great way to terraform away some extra space! Basically anything can go on them, they can be manipulated to fit any space, and they're just adorable. Sometimes the flat grassland, no matter how many items you add, will always look flat. Diversify with a few itsy-bitsy rivers!

Both of the examples above come from u/brusheswithdarkness on Reddit. They've added walkways made of custom designs around the floating islands, but you could use the basic pathways or your own designs! Besides, they don't even really need to have paths around them unless you want them to.

10 Build A Rock Garden

animal crossing new horizons - rocks 1

Listen - your rocks have to go somewhere. If you're the kind of person who'd like to keep them all in one place, why not let them fill the leftover space you have from your terraforming endeavours?

Rocks require empty space around them, so you may be a little limited as to where you can put them. But you could always get creative and just put one rock in every empty space you have on the island, then decorate around them. No one can stop you.

9 A Private Picnic Spot

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Picnic Spots in the forest

If your empty space is in the forest (or even if it isn't), you might like to add a little picnic area! We've featured two ways to do this by Instagram users @mistycove.isle (left) and @afterglow.horizons (right). While these are usually so enclosed that your villagers won't be able to use them, it won't matter because they'll just be so darn cute!

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Make them your own with...

  • Unique designs for the blankets or cushions
  • Different seating
  • Get rid of the table!
  • Your favourite food items
  • Varied bushes, flowers, and trees

8 Just Add A Table And Chairs

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Table And Chair Examples

Honestly, if your space is really that small, you can't go wrong with a table and chairs. Your residents will sit there and make it worthwhile, like in the right-hand example from u/brusheswithdarkness on Reddit. The left-hand example from @ACNHlindsey on Twitter is just beside a river, which adds its own sense of charm.

Just a few coloured flowers or purposefully chosen items will bring it to life. Be sure not to overfill the area, though! We need to be able to see your beautiful designs, so sometimes less is more.

7 Isolated Beach Spa

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Beach Examples

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players love to add a few things to their beaches:

  • Picked flowers so they look like little plants and won't grow back
  • Brick custom designs
  • Cypress Bathtubs

Sometimes, good things are popular for a reason. Mix up these aspects and add your own to customize the little slice of beach that you haven't managed to fill yet! But don't let us restrict you - if you're looking to fill up a small area somewhere other than your beach, there's no reason these items wouldn't look great there, too. Besides, you could even use the sand path on the grass to make it look more beachy. The above examples both come from Reddit users (u/brhpd on right, u/JustJess208 on left).

6 Build Your Own Stables

animal-crossing-new-horizons---stables-1-1

The example above from u/CherryTaint on Reddit depicts some gorgeous stables built with just a few of the key Animal Crossing ingredients. You've got barrels, apples, hay, wooden tables, tall panels, and an excellent custom design. If you're not a design-whiz yourself, you can find one by browsing other players' online.

Stables (or coops) could fit a wide variety of animals, so go ahead and pick your favourite! We just can't promise that Chicken Villagers won't be hurt to see their Chicken brethren cooped up in cages.

5 A Very Practical Laundry Pole

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Laundry Spots

Adding a little area for doing laundry is an adorable addition to any island. And comments like that are perfect for baffling people who don't understand why we play a game full of chores. When someone like that starts to bother you, just show them your little laundry nook and dare them to tell you that it doesn't look quaint and cute.

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The examples we're featuring here are from Reddit users u/GiaTheGiraffe01 (left) and u/bikanel_acnh (right). They've both taken a different but equally creative approach to this prompt. Many of our islands are sprinkled with these rocks that are just barely too small to fit very much. Or, if you're struggling with how to fill the space next to your ledge, add yourself a washing machine!

4 Pick A Centrepiece And Decorate Around It

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Centrepieces

A deceptively simple way to fill up small spaces is just to start with a centrepiece and build out from there. The examples above (both from u/1ottierose on Reddit) use gorgeous items as their centrepieces and expand upon them with bushes, flowers, and bug models or art. Yours don't have to be nearly as elaborate (unless you want them to be!). Just start with whatever item in your storage you've been looking for a good excuse to pull out! Building out from there will help you develop a sense for what you do and don't like.

Here are some centrepiece ideas for your brainstorming purposes!:

  • Tree(s)
  • Statues (art from Redd or special items from Gulliver)
  • Fountains
  • Seasonal/Holiday-Specific Items (i.e. Festival Float, Christmas Tree, etc)
  • Bonfire
  • Rose Bed
  • Elaborate Kimono Stand
  • Garden Waggon
  • Outdoor Bath

3 Add A Bike Stop For Your Villagers' Convenience

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Bikes

Bike Stops are another great way to fill up empty space! Sure, the villagers can't actually use bikes (sadly), but they sure as hell can admire them. Adding some kind of chair or cushion they can sit on will mean they sit around here, and you can just pretend.

While the left-hand example above (from @nookincmama on Twitter) is slightly more fancy than the right-hand one (from Stephanie Rien on Pinterest), both of them are fairly natural. If you wanted to make it more metropolitan, it would be a simple matter of adjusting the paths and adding some metal furniture instead of the wooden kind we see here.

2 Take Up Beekeeping

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Beekeeping Areas

Decorating a little space as a beekeeping sanctuary is a perfect way to use some yellow, white, and orange flowers and find a use for your models of bees from Flick! The examples on the left (from u/Florally on Reddit) take up a slightly larger area and the example on the right (from u/MartaChavet on Reddit) is a smaller take on this prompt.

If you're dealing with an even tighter nook, it's totally possible to scale down these ideas. Ideally, you'd just make sure you have at least one of each of these key items:

  • Beehive
  • Wasp nest
  • Flimsy net
  • Pot (uncustomized)
  • Flower

Whinny the Pooh isn't an Animal Crossing villager, but you can dream, right?

1 Did You Forget About A Pond?

Animal Crossing New Horizons - Pond Examples

Does your island have a pond? As we terraform, it's something that's often forgotten. However, you should have at least one pond on your island because there are certain fish that can only be caught in a pond, like goldfish!

If you're looking to fill up a little space, why not turn it into the pond you keep forgetting to include? They can't be too large or contain any running water at all, or else the game will start to think of them as a river, so you only need a few spaces anyway. The left-hand example (from u/stephieacnh on Reddit) makes for an adorable date spot, while the right-hand one (from リアン Lianne on Pinterest) goes for a traditional fishing aesthetic.

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