The Classic Cozy Hangout
I’m so proud of this client because their business has exploded and the wanted to express their new-found success by ridding their home of the hand-me-downs creating a beautiful and functional space for their family and friends to hang out in.
This design featured her grandmother’s watercolour art and one of the most stunning rugs I’ve ever seen.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you want to see how we created a plan to transform this living room space into something that can seat more people, be a lot more functional and also of course a lot more beautiful? Let’s dig right into it!
You can see right now that these clients have some hand-me-down furniture in this space. The brown leather sofa is not doing much in terms of popping out against the beige drapes and the taupe rug and then the grey and beige floor. Their flooring is fairly new. We knew that we want to keep that. Their drapery was also fairly new so we knew that we wanted to keep that in this space as well, to be the most practical inside of this.
Let’s take a look at the overall floor plan. Now this isn’t a very big room, and also we have a patio sliding door here and a kitchen on the other side. So we needed to keep a nice wide open path here to get out to the barbecue, the hot tub, things like that inside of this space. We kept the layout relatively the same, just squared off the chairs a little bit to create more of a conversational area in the space and an area that still everyone can still see the TV.
Let’s go into some of the different views here. So this one right here is sort of a before of the sofa wall. And we couldn’t move the sofa really anywhere else in the space because we had a door here, it’s open on this wall to the kitchen, and then this wall over here we couldn’t bump that far out into the space. So we did keep the TV on that wall.
Now, these guys love to have their ceiling fan inside of this space, and we wanted to keep their furnishings pretty neutral in here as well but adding in some colours through the rug, through some art prints that we didn’t source at this point because the client’s grandmother was a watercolour artist so we’re going to be pulling from the family collection in order to create some great artwork moments.
The drapery was already done really well, floor to ceiling, we wouldn’t change anything about it and so we’ll keep that in this space, but to help it feel a bit more open and airy, doing an open frame chair here that is super comfy and super cozy to curl up in was a great way to help this space feel a little bit larger.
Anchoring the sofa with two large side tables on either side helps to give this space a little bit more function, and then also bringing in a large coffee table means that everybody in the space is going to be able to reach the coffee table. As you can see before, this guy sitting over here doesn’t have a place where they can comfortably set down a drink or a snack and we want to make sure that everybody in the room feels super comfortable. The coffee table was too small for the space, and so even though this isn’t a huge room, a lot of times people will get the size of their coffee table wrong and what that does is it makes the space feel smaller and it also makes the space feel more cluttered. So in this case, we actually have a little bit more furniture but it’s going to feel less cluttered than it did before.
Now, if we take a look at this view here, sorry the picture quality is not the best. We did this when there was a lockdown so we were just kind of emailing pictures and things like that. I never stepped foot inside this home and yet we’re going to be installing this at the end of October. So really excited to show you guys some pictures from here!
But as you can see, the drapery here is hung really nicely, and this is our view coming in from this space. So you can see that we added in a lot of drama against that. Before it was a little bit very beige, very grey. We wanted to add in more drama by bringing in some black and sort of bouncing that around this space as well. So dark side tables, dark wood around the TV. That helps the TV to not be this big black hole centre point, but instead be a part of the focal point on this wall.
We head over to this side, there’s a cute pup, and you can see that the kitchen is poking out here. This is where we’re going to do a bit of an art installation here, adding in some greenery to make this space look and feel a little bit softer as well as going to make a big difference. And you can see in here, the bookcases are also going to double with some baskets at the bottom as a place for the clients to throw their flip-flops that they use when they go out to the hot tub. So flip-flops, towels those sorts of things so this becomes a functional unit as much as it is about the design and the pretty.
So a closer up look of this view right here, you can see just how pretty and soft this is going to be and how much drama it adds to the room, bringing in some dark cabinetry across here. So we’re going to do more of a brown black, which is going to add a lot of drama, but still some warmth in the space. And then we have a little bit of openness over here so that we can style up some accessories just to make this space feel a little bit more homey.
In terms of furniture pieces in this space, we ended up changing some of those out. So not going to dive into those, I’m going to let you wait for the reveal pictures, which should be revealed around mid November I’m thinking. We’re just waiting for furniture pieces to arrive, but we’re so excited to share this one with you and hope that you enjoyed the transformation.