When it comes to making your house elegant, more often than not, not making it ugly is all you need to do.
Now, as odd as this may sound, many people tend to overdo the decorations and experiment too much with the various exotic plants and pieces of furniture – which are prospects that can make your living room look either unique and beautiful or nauseating and entirely off.
The thing is, it is your living room, so you can do whatever you want with it, but if you aim to make it look elegant both in yours, your family members’, and other people’s eyes, you may want to follow absolute basics of design in order not to mess it up right off the bat.
You can think of it as a sort of checklist you need to take into consideration before you can call it a day when it comes to designing your living room.
In this article, we’re going to give you a couple of these checklist points, so you can have some idea of what you’re dealing with before you get into it. As you will see, these are mostly general guidelines, so you will still have plenty of freedom in customizing the place to make it look however, you fancy it.
Right then, folks, without further ado, here’s the deal.
Group furniture according to different categories or ‘zones’
… So that a cluster of chairs that should have been snugly tucked away underneath a table is not strewn across the living room taking up space unnecessarily.
Optimally, if you have space, you can create small zones such as the TV zone complete with sofas and armchairs facing the TV set. This can be an area where you will be able to sit down with your family, relax, and watch your favorite show.
On the other hand, you can have an area with a writing table, and a single large armchair as Bilbo Baggins has in his little Hobbit dwelling, or you can even install a gaming corner complete with your gaming kit, a couple of chairs, and your platform of choice. (PC, Xbox, PlayStation, a Pachinko machine, you name it.)
Decide on what anchoring pieces to use
One of the most essential parts of creating different zones in your living room (or even just a single zone) would be to pick your anchoring pieces.
These would include such items as the aforementioned writing desk + the armchair, or perhaps a large dining table with chairs around it. No matter the purpose, the goal is the same – install a single larger piece of furniture as the ‘anchor’ and then build the rest of the zone around it.
This way, that space will be well-used in terms of functionality, and it will not look cluttered or otherwise wasted.
(For the record, having a plethora of smaller items strewn across the living room can make the thing look quite hectic and disorganized, which is certainly not the goal.)
Incorporate big pieces of artwork into the décor
Here are some common mistakes homeowners make when it comes to decorating their living rooms – they get too shy when setting up various pieces of art they like, so they end up putting up small pictures on the wall, or perhaps a really small one on the mantelpiece.
While there’s nothing wrong with these, various pieces of art can represent much more for your living room than a couple of small framed photos, so you shouldn’t avoid trying your best to incorporate these into your living environment.
What you want is to install large-scale paintings and other pieces of art that will take up most of the wall, and that can considerably change the color scheme of the area.
Unify the overall style through repetition
The grand goal of designing your living room would come down to making the place look well unified, and as a bite-sized chunk, you can take in at once. So, it has to be pleasant to look at right off the bat; otherwise, you run the risk of it being tough on the eyes, which can make the atmosphere in it uncomfortable.
Now, to achieve this unity of style, what you want to do is repeat specific colors and patterns, so that they all match together.
This doesn’t mean that all of these patterns or colors should look exactly the same, but having multiple surfaces with checkered patterns, for example, where the checkers are of different sizes and slightly different colors, can be a great take on an otherwise simple layout.
The good thing about this approach is that it’s not just your pillows, curtains and the fabric on your sofa you can work with.
Area rugs and carpets can be an excellent designing weapon of choice you can use to turn a dull flooring into a beautiful area you’ll love to walk about. Companies have a wide choice of carpets you can get for this purpose.
Overall, the way you decorate your floor will inevitably have a big impact on how the walls, the windows, and the rest of the furniture will all look together, so taking your time to make a right designing choice for your floors can have a positive impact on the subsequent results of your designing efforts in other areas, so to speak.
The bottom line, making your living room a visually-satisfying place is not nuclear science, but if you want to do it well, you’ll need to take some designing basics into consideration.
As long as you pay your respects to this aspect of your living room overhaul, you’ll have all the freedom in the world to experiment with different setups, color schemes, patterns; you name it. You can put up gaming stations, drink bars, TV + sofa sort of deal – as long as it makes the whole room look well-rounded and nothing looks out of place, the sky is the limit. Or, the ceiling instead.