The Easy Breezy European Traditional

Do you want to see how we transformed this living room into a beautiful European traditional space?

So as you can see in the video, this room is a bit of what I call a bowling alley. It’s long and skinny. We have an awkward fireplace placement in the corner of the room, along with big, beautiful windows, and radiators. So because of that, we have to be really careful of what we’re placing near the radiators (ex. plants, things that burn easily etc.). And then we have a whole lot of open space over here, which right now is just for the kids to kind of run around in. But, we wanted this to be more of an adult space because cause right across the hall is the playroom. And so we really wanted to create something that was neutral and textured and just gives that really beautiful European traditional type of vibe.

Let’s take a look first at the furniture floor plan. In order to fill this space we decided to divide it up into two separate zones. So the zone around the fireplace and the first window here is our zone for conversation. It’s our zone for watching TV, for hanging out as a family, being the main hangout space in the home.

On the other side is more of our reading area. The clients are avid readers and we wanted to create this beautiful chaise moment right in front of the window, almost like a window bench, but we can’t build in a window bench because we’ve got the radiator there. So we needed something that could be this beautiful moment for reading, over here was just an optional piece. So not sure if the clients are going to go ahead with kind of having the little table and chairs, or we said we could keep that open. It could be a really great space for stretching, for doing yoga, that kind of thing as well.

In the overall context of things, scale is really important in this room. This rug right now, they have about a 6’x9′ in here. We went all the way up to a 10’x14′ – almost double the size of what they had in there right now, just to help to ground the different areas and then using a 6’x9′ over on the other side to help to define that space.

Remember: When we have floating furniture, it’s really important to use an area rug to ground those pieces of furniture.

Also, texture in a neutral space is everything. If you don’t have texture, the space is going to fall flat. It’s going to be boring. And because this space in particular, the only colour sort of popping in here are going to be the greenery of the plants, maybe a little bit of very, very soft muted colours and some pillows and artwork. But other than that, it’s going to be very neutral overall.

So let’s take a look then at some of the product selections that we’re bringing into this space. So you can see just a ton of texture, right? We’ve got the natural fibre texture. We’ve got some bouclé over here. We’ve got different woods. We’ve got this beautiful starburst pattern and kind of the turned legs on this piece, a really lovely ceramic glaze or ceramic mat lamp. That looks like that concrete type of feel, bringing in some plant life, some rattan, the really interesting little leather details over here, even the details in the upholstery itself. So this one here has a flanged edge, which is just this cute little edge that sort of sticks out on the sides.

You’ll see that the sofa is skirted to the ground to really create a more solid moment in this space. When everything has legs, right, the room tends to sort of walk away. And sometimes we need a piece that is super solid to the ground to help to ground the space and the sofa in this particular case was it. Sometimes you do it with a coffee table. Sometimes we do it with chairs. In this case, we wanted to do it in the sofa to create this deep, luxurious moment that is super cuddly, super soft, and we’ll just create a really stunning piece of the room.

Keep these pieces of mind as you look at the model, because sometimes when we go into the 3D models, it can look a little bit flat and you can’t see all the texture. When these all come together, it really creates this super beautiful moment. And then once we layer in some of the pillows and the textures and everything else in here, it’s going to be even better.

All right, so let’s pop back into our project here and let’s take a look. Here’s our before. And let’s take a look first at the view kind of walking into the room, so you can see now how these pieces are really coming together. This will end up being some sort of art print over here. We’ll just be cardboard boards where you will get this beautiful bop of something really soft over in that space, by creating a little bit more structure drapes, over here we’re going to do more of a pinch pleat styles drape instead of the tab top. So tab top style tends to hang very loose and casual, and not really be that perfect moment that we want in this space.

So we’re going to do some custom drapery in here with a pinch pleat header that will just sort of brush the floor and that will help. Right now these curtains are actually shrinking the space because of the puddling and they really should be moved up just a couple more inches. Because of the low ceilings, when we bring in drapery that is more appropriately scaled, it’s going to help to create a lot more height to the room. Popping in a few pieces of art here in the background, and then layering in some pretty pillows really helps to add life to a space that is totally neutral.

Now let’s take a look at the fireplace view. So the fireplace itself, the clients don’t love the tile, but we were going to work with the tile. And so I think actually the tile is going to turn out fabulously. They might end up even liking it when it’s all done, because bringing in that grey, reusing the client’s sofa that they already had in this space, it was just this really kind of soft light grey, will help to help that fireplace tile make a little bit more sense in the room. So this is a great moment for conversation. It’s a great moment for cuddling up by the fireplace. We add in this little stool here, which is awesome when you have company and there’s other small kids, and we just need more places for the little bums to sit, right? It could be great for that or bringing it over in front of that chair in the fireplace gives you a place to start a kick up your feet.

As we go into the back half here, we brought in this beautiful chaise here, along with a lamp and a little side table, which helps to create that secondary moment in this space. So when you do have a long bowling alley type of space (I’ve got two of those in my home), we have our front formal living room or a front parlor, and then we’ve got our back family room, both are long and skinny, and we created different zones within the rooms to give the room a lot more function, to give the room just a lot more style and to create more use in the room overall, so that you ended up using the spaces in your home.

So going back here, I just want to go back into our products so you can kind of see how those are all going to pull together. I think this is going to be just such a beautiful serene space. That feels very vintage. That feels very clean and classic. So can’t wait to get the furniture in and start popping these things. And it’s going to be a few months, but we are so excited to see this one come together.