The living room used to be considered a formal entertaining space — a room filled with fine furniture that was largely off-limits until the company arrived. But we’ve come a long way.
“I grew up with my parents’ living room furniture wrapped in plastic,” said Clara Jung, the principal of Banner Day Interiors, a firm based in Berkeley, Calif. “It was definitely for formal occasions, and barely used.”
But that never seemed quite right. “It’s kind of perverse that you would have the prime real estate in the house be the most underutilized space,” she said. In her design work, Ms. Jung aims to make the living room a much more casual, inviting space that serves a wide variety of functions.
Designing a living room to serve multiple functions means you get to spend more time in what is often one of the best areas of a home. It also can be a necessity in urban apartments where space is at a premium.
We asked Ms. Jung and other designers how they design do-it-all living rooms that still feel composed.
Consider Your Needs
To design a room you’ll really enjoy, first consider how you want to use the space. Don’t automatically think you need to fill the living room with family heirlooms.
When the New York architecture firm Dunham Robinson designs homes, “we get completely away from thinking about what the traditional elements of a living room are,” said Rachel Robinson, a partner in the firm. Instead, “we get to know our clients’ lifestyles and figure out what functional needs we have to accommodate.”
For instance, when designing an apartment on the Upper West Side, “the living room needed to be a media center, a library and an entertaining space,” Ms. Robinson said. For another Upper West Side client with a small loft, where the owner wanted to work from home, finding space for a desk was a priority, she said, even if it meant creating a more compact sitting area.
Depending on your interests and priorities, your living room could double as a playroom, a breakfast area, a cocktail bar, a workout space or even an art studio.
Assess Your Space
The size of your living room will affect how many functions it can serve, of course, but you might be surprised at just how much can be squeezed into even a small space.
When Erin Fearins, a partner at the architecture and interior design firm Studio SFW, conceived her family’s apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, she packed many functions into the 225-square-foot living room. Where it connects to the kitchen, she added wallpaper, a settee and corded sconces by a small table to create a dining space. She added custom cabinetry that frames a TV for movie nights, and hid a bar behind sliding panels. And she still had enough space to make a generous sitting area where the walls are lined with art.
“The living room had to be a do-everything-for-everyone space,” she said, because it was the one big common area for her family of four.
Even larger homes with expansive living rooms can benefit from similar designs. “Almost all of our clients, whether they’re in urban or suburban homes, want to occupy their living spaces,” said Andrew Franz, an architect in New York, rather than having unused rooms that feel like furniture showrooms.
“It’s almost a bigger challenge for people who have too much space,” Mr. Franz said. “How do you make it feel more intimate? How do you make it usable?”
Create Zones
The answer to making the most of your living room, whether it’s tiny, average or palatial, is to create different sections for different functions rather than having everything blend together.
“Try to create multiple little zones within the space,” Franz said.
This can be done with doors, screens and walls, or more simply with the placement of furniture, rugs and lighting.
In one home, for instance, Mr. Franz installed a desk with a folding top in one corner of the living room, near a pair of large bi-fold doors that can close a dining area off from the main sitting area.
In another home, he placed a desk behind one wing of a sectional sofa in an open living room, added a bar where the room transitions to dining space, and tucked another small table behind a wall holding a TV. A small table at one end of a living room is a place “to leave out a project or leave out a mess,” Mr. Franz said, without throwing the primary sitting area into disarray. “If the kids want to do Legos in the evening, or do a puzzle, you can leave it out and finish it the next night.”
Embrace Awkward Spaces
When your living room has a single function, leftover alcoves and architectural quirks, like awkwardly placed columns, can seem like liabilities. But when you’re trying to introduce multiple functions, these elements can be an advantage.
Ms. Fearins’s living room has one wall that terminates at the center of a bay window. Few people would see the benefit in such an architectural oddity, but Ms. Fearins made the most of it by turning the nook into a window seat with a pendant lamp for reading.
When the Toronto-based designer Sam Sacks renovated a 1,200-square-foot cottage for a client, she was faced with a primary living space bisected by an open staircase. “This house is so small that the whole ground floor needed to be a hangout space,” Ms. Sacks said.
She used the separation to create a media room for watching TV and listening to records on one side of the stairs, and a dining area wrapped by bookcases that also serves as a library and home office, on the other.
When Ms. Jung designed a living room with a leftover alcove, she closed the awkward space with bookcases, including one that functions as a secret door leading to a private listening den for a record collector. “It was like this annex that served no purpose,” Ms. Jung said. “And who doesn’t like the magic of a hidden bookcase door?”
Use Small-Scale Furniture
When trying to squeeze multiple functions into a small living room, one pitfall to avoid is buying large-scale furniture. Many contemporary sofas and armchairs have deep seats and wide arms that eat up a lot of space. But you don’t need extra-large furniture to be comfortable.
“When the furniture is a little more petite, it makes the space feel larger,” Mr. Franz said, and you can fit more pieces in a room without it feeling crowded.
This is where trying out sofas and chairs in stores and showrooms before purchasing can help, so you can be sure they’re comfortable even if they have modest proportions. Consider marking out the footprints of potential pieces on your living room floor with painter’s tape before your buy them, to make sure everything will fit.
Use Transformable Furniture
If all the furniture you want simply won’t fit, there is still another option: use shape-shifting or transformable pieces.
When Dunham Robinson was designing a 350-square-foot Manhattan apartment that they wanted to feel spacious, they designed a custom wall-mounted table. When the owner is entertaining or watching TV, the table stows flat against the wall above a bench, resembling a framed artwork. When they need a dining table or a desk it folds down, and the bench pulls out to provide seating.
“It converts the room from living space to home office to dinner party,” Ms. Robinson said.
While that table was custom, some furniture companies, such as Resource Furniture, make similar products including flip-down desks and coffee tables that rise and expand to be dining or game tables.
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