The living room is definitely an important room within a home, it’s one of the most public facing spaces, perhaps second to the kitchen in my case!
The living room is a place to show off your interests whether that’s installing a word class entertainment system or creating a library like retreat, you want to make sure your living room works for you, your lifestyle and your interests.
Before you start investing in furniture take a step back and consider the layout of the room, open plan spaces have to be designed differently than homes separated into confined spaces, if the layout is airy with the kitchen, dining and living combined you’ll have to spend more time thinking about flow.
Similar to the layout colour will play a huge importance as the shades selected for the living area need to work with your kitchen, be sure to go a step further and think about the woods and fixtures.
We have touched on this before but zoning will be your best friend, decided what areas in a room should be designated to functionality and which areas should be social.
With smaller or confined spaces you will want to start with a focal point, art is the best starting point as it will give the room a mood and a colour palette. Pull colours from the art into the décor and upholstery to create a cohesive scheme.
From there you can consider scale. We all dream of a large, plush comfy sofa but in reality cramping large furniture into a smaller space is going to be a disaster. You can ditch certain pieces like a coffee table, instead how about a set of multi functional side tables that offer additional storage or extra seating?
When I designed the furniture plan for the Notting Hill apartment storage was at the forefront of the design choices, mainly because a have a vast collection of books and sculpture which I wasn’t prepared to part with.
I toyed with two different layouts, one was much more open with the sofa against the right hand wall and the other had the sofa floating, in the end I decided to add a large shelving unit to maximise on storage which worked for me and my partners lifestyle.
Don’t worry, for those who love the first layout, I had to choose a different coffee table but I made sure to source a sofa that fit against the right hand wall in addition to the shelving.
