Your living room does a lot of the heavy lifting for your home decor. After all, this is the room that sees the most foot traffic, forms the centrepiece of your ground floor, and generally sets the tone for your decor elsewhere. That might seem like a lot of pressure for one room, but you really can’t underestimate how vital this space is to how your home looks overall.
That’s great news if your living room looks exactly how you’ve always dreamed, but what if your current living room layout falls foul of fatal mistakes? This is more common than you might think, and it can have a pretty major detrimental decor-based ripple effect. Luckily, we’re here to help by breaking each mistake down to size and considering how you can avoid them. Let’s get started!
1 – Creating Awkward Centres
Many of us push living room furniture right to the sides of the room, but interior experts are increasingly warning against this style choice for one obvious reason – it creates an awkward centre that you simply don’t need.
Aside from looking unappealing, a sizable living room chasm is a waste of space that you can only really fill with a large coffee table. By comparison, bringing furniture away from those edges helps to more effectively fill your room, and creates walkways around those edges that you’ll actually use.
# 2 – Limited Focal Points
Photo by Alex Qian
Living rooms are spaces that thrive on focal points, which serve to ground the space, draw the eye, and generally tie decor together. Yet, a surprising number of homeowners choose the television as their one and only focal point. As well as drawing the eye straight to what is probably the least attractive feature in this space, this one-track focus can see you neglecting other amazing features, such as a striking chimney breast.
Of course, you don’t want focal points all over the room, but combining focal features can be a great way to add more depth. Simply wallpapering one wall, or a feature like a chimney breast, can help to serve this purpose. Equally, you could invest in additions like these media wall fires, which can serve as a far more impressive and varied focal point that integrates your fireplace right alongside that screen you’ve been focusing on until now.
# 3 – Failing Functionality
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Sometimes, living room layout mistakes also just come down to functionality failures, which could see you following trends rather than thinking about how you actually use this space. After all, cream sofas and plush carpets might look great, but they’ll never work for you if you have kids or pets in the house. Instead, always think about how you use your living room when choosing decor and layouts more generally, and make sure that you’re creating the space, look, and functionality that’s most likely to feel like it’s truly yours.
There’s a lot resting on living room layouts. Make sure you get them right by avoiding these common mistakes!
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