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.
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