The living room is often the most flexible room in your house. While the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom all serve a functional purpose, the living room is a more varied space that can be designed and outfitted to perform a range of functions depending on your needs. Naturally, this goes for the design and visual aesthetics that you choose, too.
Whether you are making minor changes to your living room or want to overhaul the entire space, it is important to consider everything that your living room needs to accomplish. Do you host big parties or have large gatherings in your living room, for example? This kind of thinking can be really important when it comes to planning out a brand-new living room space.
Size
One of the first steps to take when planning your living room redesign is to understand how much space you can work with. Large and small living rooms both have a lot of potentials, but for vastly different reasons, and the limitations of each can be very important to consider.
A smaller living room is naturally going to be more compact, meaning that larger furniture pieces will take up more space and become more unwieldy. This pushes you towards smaller furniture pieces or more creative use of the limited space that you have available.
A larger living room may allow for larger furniture pieces, but it is also very easy to create a living room that looks unnaturally empty. Making use of the extra space can be surprisingly difficult, and you may end up spending more on furniture and decorations just to make it all feel right.
Style
The second most important thing to consider is the style of the living room that you choose. There are countless aesthetic choices and style-related decisions to make, and that can be very overwhelming at first. However, the important part is that you think about what you personally want, even if it might not be a currently popular style.
One of the first things you need to consider is the color of your walls. Neutral or soft colors are not only a great way to create a calming space, but they can really help your design aesthetic come through and be distinct. Of course, some people prefer the exact opposite, using brighter and more vivid colors that really pop out.
This is just one of many examples of something that can impact the overall style of your living room. Every single change you make to the space will alter its overall look and feel somehow, so it can be important to try and understand the general idea of what you want to go for.
Another good example might be the flooring that you use. If you want wood for aesthetic reasons, then you have a few options – treated wood, untreated wood, fake synthetic wood, and artificial tiles that try to replicate wood. On top of that, you have dozens of types of wood to choose from, giving an otherwise simple choice a huge amount of flexibility – for better or for worse.
Function
A perfectly designed space will be almost pointless if there is not really a reason to go there. Living rooms can be more than just a space to sit down, and you need to consider the functional side of your living room when you are making direct changes to its design, furnishings, and layout. If you focus entirely on the design, you might create a space that looks nice but does not really work as a living room.
If you are planning a big living room redesign, you will need to take into account what it will actually be used for. Large parties will need more seating, temporary or otherwise. If you tend to eat food in your living room, a proper table could be useful. Some homes need space for a desk and computer, a games console, or various other devices and appliances that would need cable connections to power outlets.
The living room is not a single thing – it is your entire house’s most flexible room, so you have to know that when you redesign it, you are changing the whole space. It can be a recreational space, a place to rest, a place to eat, a place to gather, and even somewhere to work: not all of these will apply to you, but you still want to be prepared for the functional uses that you do care about.
Furniture
It can be easy to overlook the fact that furniture is a very important part of any living room. Your chairs, coffee tables, tables, TV stands and stands, and of course, your couch is all going to be part of your overall space plan. Depending on what you do, just making some minor changes to your living room can require you to move all of the furniture into a completely new configuration.
Know what kind of furniture you want to use for your home. Take some time to figure out the kind of style that you want to go for, the specific kinds of seating and surfaces that you might like, or even the amount of storage that you are looking for in a new living room.
For example, you might decide to have unique living room display cabinets as a focal point of the room. In other cases, you could have a couple of large and expensive pieces that dominate the room, or you might want to use smaller pieces that make a more subdued statement. It all depends on what you are looking for and the kind of furniture that you want to actually include in your new living room.
Speaking of furniture, a large part of the design and appearance of any living room is the lights, too. Your lights will be a very important factor in making your room feel unique, but even the colors that you choose can make a big difference. The kind of lighting that you use – from your normal overhead lighting to standing lamps – can be just as important as functional furniture.
