How to Give Someone Access to Your Apartment in FFXIV

Sharing your personal housing space in Final Fantasy XIV is one of the more social features the game offers — whether you want a friend to help decorate, a Free Company member to use your facilities, or a partner to feel at home in your virtual living space. But the permission system has a few layers, and knowing exactly which setting does what will save you a lot of confusion.

Understanding FFXIV's Housing Permission System

FFXIV separates housing into Free Company estates and private housing (apartments and personal plots). Apartments specifically are individual units purchased inside apartment buildings found in each residential district. Because they're personal spaces, access control sits entirely with the owner.

There are two primary ways someone can enter and interact with your apartment:

• Visitor access — they can enter and look around but cannot move or place furniture
• Roommate/decorator access — they can actively place, move, and edit furnishings

These aren't labeled with those exact terms in-game, but the distinction matters depending on what you actually want to share.

Step-by-Step: Opening Your Apartment Door 🚪

Step 1 — Set Your Door Status

When you're inside your apartment, open the Housing menu. You'll find this through the main menu or by interacting with your apartment's entrance. Look for Relinquish Tenure and Apartment Settings — the setting you want is your door status, which can be toggled between:

• Open — anyone can enter freely
• Closed — no one can enter without an invite while you're present

Setting the door to Open is the quickest way to let a specific person walk in on their own. However, this means anyone can enter, not just the person you have in mind. For a public-facing decorating space or a shared hangout, this is fine. For a more controlled setup, you'll need to be present to invite them directly.

Step 2 — Inviting Someone Directly

If your door is set to Closed, you can still let someone in by being logged in and physically present in the apartment. When the other player is in the same residential district and interacts with your door, they'll be prompted to request entry. You'll receive a notification and can accept or deny it.

This method requires both players to be online simultaneously, which isn't always practical.

Step 3 — Granting Decoration Permissions

If you want someone to be able to move and place furniture — not just visit — you need to go through the Housing Resident settings. This is found in the Housing menu under Resident Settings or Edit Permissions, depending on your menu version.

From there you can designate another player as having decoration access. This gives them the ability to enter layout mode and make changes to your space. This is the closest FFXIV gets to a true "roommate" arrangement in a private apartment.

Important: Decoration access is a meaningful level of trust. A player with this permission can move or remove your placed furniture items. It doesn't grant them ownership or the ability to relinquish your apartment, but furniture repositioning is fully within their power.

Key Variables That Affect How This Works 🔑

The permission system behaves slightly differently depending on a few factors worth knowing:

One thing players sometimes mix up: Free Company housing has a more granular permission system with guest, member, and officer tiers. Private apartments do not have that same layered structure — your options are more binary.

What Apartments Can and Can't Share

It's worth being clear about what apartment access doesn't include:

• You cannot co-own an apartment — one character holds the lease
• You cannot grant access to storage or inventory through housing permissions
• Mannequins and item displays are visible to visitors but cannot be interacted with by them
• Orchestrion rolls you've set will play for visitors, but they can't change the track

The social experience of sharing an apartment is more about ambiance, decoration collaboration, and having a meeting spot than functional shared storage.

Different Players, Different Setups

How useful this system feels varies a lot by play style. Players who focus heavily on housing and interior design often grant decoration access to trusted friends to collaborate on elaborate builds — it's a genuine creative workflow for that community. Casual players might simply set their door to Open during events or when they want visitors to drop by.

Roleplayers frequently use apartments as scene-setting spaces for their groups, relying on open-door settings so other participants can enter without coordinating login times. Meanwhile, players who treat the apartment purely as a personal storage annex or glamour dresser location may never touch the permission settings at all.

The feature is functional but limited compared to what dedicated housing enthusiasts sometimes want — particularly around offline access and more granular control. Whether the current system fits what you're trying to accomplish depends entirely on whether you're decorating collaboratively, hosting casually, or doing something in between.