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A simple guide for decorating your living room
It is the beginning of a new decade and we thought we’d start the month off with simple décor ideas that are easy to execute. There are many ways to style a room but even the most complicated spaces must follow some basic guidelines about placement, scale, practicality, etc. What does that mean? Well, we’ll tell you, precisely. The picture you see with this story is a room styled with just the essentials of furniture and accessories. Our intent is to get you started on your design journey with some key things to keep in mind:
The Room
This guide is based in an average sized room—12 ft. x 10 ft.—that has on its walls the most popular wall paint colour used in Indian homes, Cream Caress from Asian paints.
Simple guidelines you can follow to decorate your living room.
The Furniture
1. We begin setting up the space with the sofa, placing it against the longest wall in the room.
2. We didn’t stick the sofa to the wall. In this layout there’s about 12 inches of space between the two, but this also depends on the space in a room. Keeping a bit of a distance also prevents heads touching the wall and the artwork that’s on it.
3. We then placed the coffee table, aligning it with the centre of the sofa.
4. We’ve kept the coffee table at a distance of 14 to 18 inches from the sofa so there’s plenty of leg room, and the table is also within arm’s reach.
5. The side table is close enough to the sofa to easily reach and place a drink on it. Test this out while seated on the sofa to decide the spot for your side table.
6. The placement of any additional seating like a lounge chair should provide room for movement but be close enough for conversations. Neither too close nor too far, we’ve kept about 18 inches between the sofa and the lounge chair.
7. An area rug helps define the space. Here we’ve placed the rug under the coffee table. For a larger room, a bigger rug that could encompass the sofa would also work.
Switch Board And Electrical Points
1. A panel with both plug points and switches placed on a very visible part of a wall is a common sight in living room designs. But this means you end up with dangling wires that look messy. Instead, split switches and plug points. We’ve placed the switch panel at a height that’s easy to access right by the door, while the plug points can be been hidden low on the wall behind the side table and next to the sofa.
2. The wires of the floor lamp next to the sofa are hidden along the wall.
3. Switchboard covers will ensure that children and pets don’t get inside them.
Placing your plug point panel close to the floor doesn't bring the wires in focus and they remain hidden.
Using floor lenght curtains irrespective of the window's size, adds height to the room.
The Window
1. Most apartments have a picture window which makes walls look small. To compensate, we’ve used floor-length curtains that begin above the window and go all the way down adding height to the room.
2. To avoid dust building up at the bottom, the curtain panels float about an inch off the floor.
3. The curtain rod is longer than the frame of the window to allow as much sunlight as possible into the room when the curtains are drawn. We extended the rod by 6 inches on each side.
4. Leaving some space between the curtain rod and the window frame has also helped the window space look bigger.
5. We chose an Indian print that is interesting but also subtle and blends with the other colours in the room. To learn more about the ways to choose the right drapes for your living room, read this story here.
Wall Decor
1. Decorative items like wall art, frames can be used in living rooms. The art frame we used has been aligned to the centre of the sofa.
2. The frame should be at an average eye level, not too high and not so low that a person sitting on the sofa might hit their head on it.
The living room is the hardest working room in a house, and a multi-purpose, multi-identity space. It is a makeshift dining space, a naptime spot, and entertainment room. A room that works so hard deserves a little extra attention after all…
