While certainly not our first project to tackle in the long list of rooms that need furniture and decorating, I am excited to get our living room design squared away. I thought I’d sit with our living room only partially furnished for awhile. Friends of ours who have furnished a home always tell us that the rooms that got used the least like the formal dining room and living room sat empty or unfinished for a long time. I couldn’t help myself with our dining room, but I have been trying to force myself to let our living room lie for the time being and focus more on the other spaces that need more work and focus. We have furniture from our last home in our living room right now that works. It’s not perfect and exactly what I want it to look like, but it gets the job done so to speak and it actually doesn’t look bad. The problem is I can’t leave a project undone (I’m a doer) and the living room happens to be my favorite space in the house. It has great light and I find myself doing work in there a lot, maybe because it’s one of the only spaces the kids don’t really infringe on. While we’ll probably wait to invest in new furniture and rugs and all that for the space, I wanted to give it a small refresh and start filling in some of the pieces. I don’t want to buy anything now though that we won’t use in the room’s final iteration, so I’m trying to get an idea of what I want it to eventually look like so I know I’m on the right track. To that end, I’ve started gathering living room design inspiration.
We are in a center hall colonial (is that what you call it?) with a formal living room off the front hall. It’s a nice big, long rectangular room with great windows and a fireplace. It’s a lot of space to fill and a somewhat unique layout to figure out. The room is long and rectangular so it’s a bit of a conundrum. I did pull inspiration from Chauncey Boothby’s living room, which doesn’t look quite as long as ours, but appears to have a somewhat similar rectangular layout and really captured my attention when it was featured in House Beautiful, one of my sister publications. I love how she laid it out with two seating areas and hope to do something similar with our living room design. I actually love the whole look of her living room, but it may be a bit more coastal than we are going to go with, as we went a bit more formal and feminine in the dining room and feel like the spaces should probably feel similar in formality since they’re across from each other. I was going to use this white couch with blue trim as a jumping off point for the living room but my husband is really wary of the white with our kids. In theory this wouldn’t be a room they’d really play in, but they’re still disasters and we don’t want the room to be so precious it goes unused since it’s such a great space. I really want our house to be full of rooms that we use and live in and aren’t just for decor. Plus, we hope to entertain a lot, and I don’t want to cry if a guest (or I) spill or be like that crazy lady in Sex and the City who only allowed clear beverages at her Park Avenue parties.
I am going back and forth between what the look and feel of the room will be, but as you’ll see from our living room design inspiration, it will have a blue and white schema. For this space, I’m thinking of leaning more into the light blue. Take a look at our living room design inspiration that I pulled and let me know what you think. While I probably won’t invest in a ton of furniture here for a bit since our existing couches and casegoods do work, I do want to add a desk and coffee and side tables and some new sconces and curtains to make it feel more like us. Open to any and all suggestions.
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