As the central gathering space of your home, your living room makes a considerable statement about who you are and your visions of creative style. Furniture choices lay the foundation, with carefully chosen paint colors, tactile and durable fabrics, and convenient flow to build a useable space worthy of attention. Often, living rooms spaces are centered with large windows facing out into the neighborhood and therefore can be an intimate slice of your style that can be shared with a passersby.
Taking time to creatively focus on living room interior design will not only help you fit one more piece into your whole home design concept, but will also allow you the freedom to experiment with different looks as time goes by. With your furniture in place, everything else can be adjusted with your changing tastes from season to season.
Furniture choices
As your primary socializing space, your living room should have a balance of being both a day to day pleasure and a showcase for your taste. Make furniture choices that are durable and pleasing to the eye, moving along lines that work with your overall design style. For example, if your room’s concept is of a Southwest flair, you can pick pieces from the mission style catalogue. These will work well with overtones of browns and off-white color combinations, traditional for the look. You would not, however, naturally choose furniture designed for a more Victorian appearance, such as Queen Anne chairs with light blue fabric, without serious consideration of line and texture and how it will flow with other pieces in the room.
This is not an overt rule, as blending styles can work in the right space. This blending needs to be part of a more expansive design concept for the entire home. Random pieces placed together because they look nice individually will not go far in translating an overall interior design concept.
Living room colors
With the furniture in place, an eye for color will begin to bring it all together. This means matching wall color to traditional pairings of the furniture, as well as the colors on the exposed wood. Darker mahoganies and rosewoods should be paired with lighter wall tones, while lighter woods such as pine or maple can contrast darker wall colors.
Choose paints based on the functions of the room – if the room will be used extensively by small children, look for durable and easy-to-wash products. A magic eraser is a wonderful tool, but even that won’t work on a non-treated wall paint covered in permanent marker.
Interior design fabrics
You may well enjoy the stock fabrics that came with your furniture, but by no means are you required to keep them. Reupholstering can be a marvelous way of blending your own tastes with a furniture design you’ve fallen in love with. Here, you can not only choose your own base look, but can branch out to throw pillows and cushions for a truly personal statement.
Just as with paints, look for fabrics that match your space, and if needed can be easily cleaned should they become soiled.
Comfortable use
Lastly, look to how the room flows from both a roving eye perspective and one considering foot traffic. The room is an entire concept, and each piece should lead the viewer on to the next in order to drink in the entire interior design idea. A darker pillow, for example against lighter upholstery should induce a visitor to then admire an ebony vase on a bookshelf, which in turn takes them to another part of the room.
For foot traffic, ensure your space is designed so visitors and your family can move about easily without bumping into tightly packed furniture. The room is to be used, after all, and seen from within. This can’t be accomplished if no one can pass through.
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