What’s your style? Are you a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, a minimal modernist, or a contemporary curator of a little bit of both? The rooms and homes that ignite my creative passion are often a modern-life mix where the architecture serves as a foundation and the interiors are crafted to embrace elegant, original details and sleek contemporary influences in equal measure. In a century-old home, the design brief was to honour the character details while ushering in a modern spirit.
If your aesthetic veers to the light and neutral palette of cream, pearl, platinum, oyster, and ecru, you need never worry about taking a major decorating misstep with traumatic results. Tailored furnishings, upholstered in a restrained palette, have proven trend-resistant staying power. When you lay the groundwork by investing in timeless, neutral pieces, you’ve taken the first step toward longevity, but you’ve also opened the door to changeability by allowing the flexibility to rethink accents, accessories, and art in the future. With your neutral backdrop, it’s always easy to swap out high-impact accents for a new palette and make it look as though you got a whole new room.
Once you’ve got a neutral starting point, it’s time to turn up the dial and have some fun. Using a painting to help inspire the selection of colours in a room will allow you to highlight the unique palette of colours that the artist chose to include in the work and will likely produce a combination that is unexpected and fresh as opposed to trendy and ubiquitous. Wondering where to start? Since lugging your painting to the fabric store might be tricky, match individual paint chips to all of the colours you like in the painting, and tuck them into an envelope so you can have a quick reference when shopping for matching fabrics and accessories. This approach will let you have fun treating the finishing touches in your room as painterly accents that add a dash of excitement here and a wash of colour there.
Having a home with unusual architectural details is a blessing, but can make the selection of furniture a bit more challenging than shopping for a rectangular box of a room. An offset bay window brings in lovely natural light, though it also makes the placement of a standard-sized sofa look awkward in the room. Instead of crowding the wrong pieces into the space, be realistic about how you are likely to use your living room. Two groupings with more individual chairs may actually be better suited to entertaining — and if you don’t have a TV in the room, a full-length sofa may not be necessary.
When it comes to dressing the mantel, I believe less is always more. Presenting a strong, well-edited vignette of beautiful objects on one side of the mantel creates a more stunning visual than little bits and bobs that stretch from side to side and fill the entire space. Since your mantel is likely shallow, look for objects in varying heights with sculptural shapes that aren’t too wide in diameter. Uneven groupings always look best, so plan for 3, 5, or 7 pieces in your collection.
A coffee table is a common anchor in a living room furniture grouping that provides a central position around which the furniture is symmetrically arranged. If your living room plan takes a more asymmetrical form, don’t feel obliged to try to make a sizable coffee table fit into your space. If flexibility is a priority, you might prefer a collection of occasional tables and footstools, which can be pulled up close to a chair to offer a spot to set down your drink, rearranged to provide extra seating, or used to support tired tootsies. As long as every seat has a table surface within reach from a seated position, you’re in good shape.
