Every room in your home has a purpose. Your kitchen is a place that makes preparing meals efficient and convenient. Your bedroom is supposed to be relaxing and easy to fall asleep in. And your living room is supposed to comfortable and fun — it’s a place to enjoy time by yourself or with your loved ones, and it’s a place to let you recharge.
But how well your rooms serve their intended purposes depends, to a large degree, on how you create and care for those spaces. Depending on your organization systems, your living room can be better or worse at being your refuge and retreat away from the obligations of the outside world. If you don’t feel happy and relaxed in your own living room, here is some advice on improving that space!
Where classy meets customized
When you were younger, personalizing your space was how you claimed it. Perhaps you added posters of your favorite bands and movies to your bedroom walls. The common rooms and living rooms of your dorm spaces and early apartments might have been decorated with photos of friends and family.
You can and should still customize your living room space, but how you do so will affect the energy of your space. If you want a dignified yet comfortable space, you should consider expressing your personal tastes in wall hangings and shelf decorations that also have weight and class to them. For instance, photos of friends and family members will look wonderful if you take the time to choose the right shots and add weight by framing them or, better yet, having them turned into custom canvas prints. Canvas printing is a way to create art-quality prints of personal memories.
You can also hang your own artwork, ticket stubs, and all sorts of other personal items and images. The key, of course, is just to display them properly! Invest in frames, display boxes, shadow boxes, and other things which give weight and dignity to your choice of decor. If you do it right, you’ll end up with a room that’s personal and comfortable, but also clean and beautiful in a way that makes you proud.
Managing the light
Light can make or break a room. Getting the right amount of light is important, but too much light (and especially glare at certain times of the day) can be a big problem. That’s why you need to invest in window treatments.
Interior designers have known it for a long time. Things like curtains and blinds are what separate well-decorated rooms from more juvenile and haphazard efforts. So take the time to invest in classy window shades and blinds, such as timber venetian blinds. Good blinds or curtains should be effective at blocking light or letting in the right amount. They should be easy to adjust, and they should be beautiful too. Swapping plastic blinds for Venetian blinds can make a big difference, so think hard about how to handle windows.
Use your furniture wisely
Comfortable furniture is a must in any living room, of course: where would you be without your couch or favorite chair? You should, of course, invest in furniture that is beautiful and timeless, so that you can keep it in the same space for a long time without it looking tacky or dated. But there’s more to managing furniture than picking the right, because arranging the furniture matters too.
Take time to master the flow of your space. Allow foot traffic to move through and around your space, and don’t create dead ends with your furniture. When possible, move furniture out from the wall and create “zones” (but again, these zones are not dead ends).
Your perfect living room
Living rooms are important spaces. Make sure that yours is everything that it needs to be. You’ll be amazed by the difference that a few changes can make.