In the past, living room
or the parlor was the place with formal settings to
welcome the honored guests. With times, it has evolved
into a multifunctional room meant to welcome guests,
sit and relax comfortably while reading a good book or
watching TV, spend some time with the family, chat and
gossip with friends and for entertainment.
The most common furniture pieces
found in the living room are sofas, love seat, sofa with chairs in
different combinations, coffee table, end tables, ottomans,
benches, shelves and perhaps a desk and bookshelves. If the living
space is also used as a family room, you can also find TV and
entertainment center in the room along with accessories, lighting,
art and crafts on display and may be carpets.
An extra large living room may accommodate a piano, eating area
complete with dining table, tennis or billiard table or even a
number of plants, if your living space receives lots of direct
sunlight. You may also shift am armoire to make use of the extra
space for storage purposes. Living room can use maximum number of
furnishings and it is a challenge to fit in all the desirable
furnishings and accessories and coordinate them with carpeting,
wall color, crown moldings, lighting style and window treatments
among many other things. Usually, sofa or the entertainment center
is the largest piece of furniture in a living room and since,
placement of sofa will decide the view and focal point for the
people seated in the living, room, use it as the starting point
for living room decor.
Express your personality, your personal taste and decorating flair
in the way you decorate your living room. Remodeling or decorating
your living room doesn't just mean to throw away items and add
furniture pieces to the living room but how you arrange what you
already have in the room. Arrangement mistakes can ruin the look
of your room. Do not go wild with imagination. Some of the rules
and traditional ways of keeping things and proper design must be
followed to keep things sane. Creative and unusual living room
decorating ideas should be limited by the comfort and usability of
the room to make the living room more inviting.
Designing in innovative ways that 'break the rules' can be tricky,
so is best left to professionals. Ensure that you maintain visual
balance and harmony while displaying your accessories and should
not look chaotic. For budget decorating, try to use what you
already and then only opt to buy new things that you think are
absolutely necessary. See, if rearranging furniture and
accessories can achieve the effect you want. For a dream living
room, it is not necessary to start from scratch. Make sure that
you do not let your precious collection of art lie wasted or
ignored just because you didn't think of placing them correctly.
While decorating a living room, one must pay attention to the
natural focal point of the room, lifestyle of the family members,
functional placement of furniture, creating well-defined traffic
patterns, creating close grouping and intimate conversational
areas, visual balance, ambient lighting, color scheme of the room
and fabric patterns of the curtains, window treatments and the
upholstery. You must also watch out for organizing things, display
of accessories, camouflaging architectural elements that are ugly,
hanging art and wall groupings, proportion and scale of
decoration, unifying factor of your decoration and most
importantly, when to stop.
