Redesigning a Living Room With a Challenging Layout

Hey, it’s Heather here with another before and after video.

This particular home has a really, really challenging layout because we have this angular fireplace over here. Oh my goodness. So the clients (love them by the way!) have this gorgeous big gray sectional that they have inside of this space. You can see, obviously, they have kids. So we need toys storage inside of this space. The fireplace isn’t going anywhere. They’re done with the construction of their home. They don’t want to have to move this big behemoth of brick fireplace. So we wanted to deal with that as well.

For the draperies, you’re going to see in the updated space, but we want to actually bring that up because again, we have short ceilings. So bringing your drapery rod up about two inches from the ceiling and extending our draperies up that way is going to give us a little bit more height in this space.

Right off of this living room, we’ve got a bathroom and a laundry room. So luckily these doors swing into the bathroom and the laundry room, and they’re not impeding us here. But we have a lot of dead space over here, and obviously just a lot of dead floor space over here as well that we wanted to address with this super, super tricky layout.

So let’s take a look at how we solved for that!

You can see we ended up removing the TV from above the fireplace because most people just naturally want to put the TV above the fireplace. They go “well that’s the focal point of the room”. But the truth is you can have multiple focal points inside of a room. We created a second focal point by moving the TV over beside the windows instead and placing a media unit underneath of it, which allowed us then to turn the sofa.

Turning the sofa allowed us to create more of an entryway. This is the entry door right over here in this space. So this allowed us to create a little bit more of an entryway flanking the clients gorgeous console table with two lamps so that it gets a little bit beefier, because the console table was probably way too small for the space it needed to be in. But by adding these two super cute lamps on either side, it allowed us to bulk that up and not have to replace a piece that the client already loved and that they already had.

We kept the client’s round coffee table here, adding a slightly larger rug to fill up the space and then adding a little bit of wood on this wall, again to just fill in that texture and help it really stand out as a focal point against all of the brick and the texture that are over on this side.

What you don’t see in these photos is that over here where the deer head was, so we have the two doors over on this side. And then they had just sort of a pedestal with a deer head over here and all of this empty space. So what we did instead of that was on this wall right here, we actually placed two floor to ceiling open shelves, and right in front of that angled in a couple of chairs with a little table in between. So it’s a great place to have a glass of wine with your girlfriends or kind of wind down at night. And because of the angle and because this door swings in, we were able to do that without blocking the traffic of that space and just fill in that gap a little bit. This adds some functional storage for all the kids’ toys and creates another conversational zone inside of the room.

I hope you guys are loving these before and afters! We love doing them and seeing the look on our client’s faces when we show them all the potential of their spaces.

See you next time!