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By TRACEY ANDREWS 2,503 views
HOME IMPROVEMENT

Tips on Decorating your Living Room

The living room is a focal point for nearly every home and a room where we spend a lot of our leisure time. If you have decided to bring some life back into your living room, you fancy a change of style, or perhaps you just fancy doing a renovation project in the home, then there is quite a lot to think about with your living room! In this article we give some good tips on decorating your living room to achieve that elusive ‘wow’ factor:

Focal Point

This is the anchor point of the room where your guests’ eyes are drawn to on entering the room. Some of the classic traditional focal points include things like a nice big fireplace, a flat-screen television, or perhaps even a piece of art or even a uniquely decorated wall. Sometimes we may choose to have multiple focal points in a single room. This is no problem if they complement each other and don’t conflict.

Furniture Arrangement

How furniture is configured in a room can have a dramatic impact on social interaction. There will always be a tradeoff here between good space planning and configuring furniture for social interaction. On one hand, we want to maximize the space available in the room, and on the other hand, we want the room to be welcoming and promote the fact that it is a social space. This can be achieved through positioning sofas opposite or next to each other, positioning coffee tables in between, or perhaps using a curved or corner sofa for example.

Choose your Colour Scheme

Selecting a good color scheme for your living room can really help to promote a warm and friendly atmosphere. By impacting how your guests feel, this will translate into a much more social feel. Warm, neutral colors usually work well and therefore making it easy with furniture too. It should be noted that neutral doesn’t have to be boring. There are plenty of neutral colors that can look great, but at the same time neutralize the room.

Natural Light

Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to pay a good bit of attention to ‘daylighting’. Not only is it a very good way to conserve energy, but it gives your living room a welcoming feel throughout the day. This can be achieved through large windows, skylights, using some reflective surfaces, and ensuring that you don’t block any light with the design and layout of the room.

Flooring

When choosing the flooring for your living room it’s usually a good idea to think about durability when picking the surface. If you envisage the room getting a lot of foot traffic, then it may well pay to choose something more hard-wearing, such as a natural wood floor for example. Another benefit of a wooden surface is that it’s easy to clean too. Although some might say this gives a cold feeling to the room, this can always be remedied with a nice warm rug.

Space Planning

Keeping the room free from clutter is another key point in the design process. You might think about a wall-hung television, and possibly even some inset shelving to help maximize the space available. When space planning for your living room design you should also think about scale. By this, we mean furnishing the room with a size that is appropriate for the room. Many people will buy a television that looks way too big on the wall for example or a huge rug for a tiny room.

Declutter

Most living rooms can become a bit of a dumping ground for many different items due to the amount of time that many of us spend in the room. Having a lot of clutter can however have a detrimental effect on the appearance and feel of any room of a property. It’s, therefore, a good idea to design your living room to ensure that you have adequate storage which will help to keep clutter at bay. These days there are lots of creative ways one can create storage solutions in very subtle and clever ways. Whether it’s inbuilt storage, or within furniture for example.

Finishing touches

A great way to finish off your living room is through soft furnishings and other accessories to make the room feel more welcoming.  This can be in the form of nice rugs, cushions, standalone dimmable lamps, nice ornaments, and nice flowers. In this section, there are literally too many things to mention, but paying attention to the finishing touches of a room can really pay dividends to the overall feel of a room.

We hope that you have got some good information from our guide on decorating a living room. Please follow us for more interior design tips and ideas to improve your home.

Tracey Andrews
Author
TRACEY ANDREWS

Blogger and writer covering a range of different subjects from interior design to project management and construction.