The wave propagation in structures involving metamaterials can be described owing to homogenization approaches which allow to replace the material structured at the subwavelength scale by an equivalent and simpler, effective medium. In its simplest form, homogenization predicts that the equivalent medium is homogeneous and aniso-tropic and it is associated to the usual relations of continuity for the electric and magnetic fields at the boundaries of the metamaterial structure. However, such prediction has a range of validity which remains limited to relatively thick devices and it is not adapted to more involved geometries (notably three-dimensional). The following two aspects are considered: (i) we study how the homogenization at the leading order can be improved when the thickness of the device becomes small and (ii) we propose a heuris-tic extension of the solution given by the leading order homogenization in order to deal with a complex geometry; in the latter case, an application to a demultiplexer device is proposed.