The Industrial Farmhouse

Let’s talk about how we transformed this open-concept living room into a beautiful industrial farmhouse space!

In the video, you can see what we were working with before: a lot of brown and greyish tones kind of kicking throughout the space. A really lovely floor colour here in a nice honey tone, but it has some darker Walnut tones also throughout, which is fantastic! This fireplace is ginormous and deep, and it’s also a little bit taller than average. And so, because of the way that the fireplace itself was installed, it probably has very high BTUs. And the venting itself is very thick and deep. The way that it was installed is about two to three times as deep as a normal fireplace, so you really do feel that when you’re inside of the space and we really wanted to help to balance that out a little bit.

We also have incredibly high vaulted ceilings in here – almost 18 feet tall. And because of that, we have a lot of volume of space that we needed to fill, to create a really beautiful focal point in this home. So this client’s style after we went through the style exercise, was really an industrial farmhouse. So they had this great farmhouse style kitchen that they had. They have lots of beautiful industrial elements in some of the other rooms in their home that they’ve invested in. And now is the time to bring that industrial farmhouse style into their main living area. This is kind of the view that you get when you first walked through the door. And so really excited to share this one with you.

Now let’s take a look first at the furniture plan and the layout that the client chose. What we wanted to do was pull the furniture arrangement away from the walls while still allowing great space and flow here through to the kitchen. And then the door that leads to the backyard is just around this corner. By pulling the sofa away from the wall and anchoring everything with a nice big area rug helps to create this centred focal moment around the fireplace. When everything was pushed over, the fireplace really stuck out. Whereas we want the fireplace to be apart of the overall focal point and the overall scene rather than being the thing that you look at. So by bringing in a great big sectional here and adding in a little console table behind it to fill the space so that we don’t just have this narrow little walkway behind it. But it’s a purposeful and useful space that helps to create a secondary focal point for when you are sitting in the kitchen, you can take a look at this beautiful focal point that we created behind the sofa.

A couple of chairs round this out, along with two nice big Ottomans. Have we just done one, the Ottomans would actually feel a little bit cluttery because when we do smaller pieces in a large space and we don’t fill the scale appropriately, then everything looks a little bit rinky-dink, everything looks a little bit cheaper. Even if you got the most expensive Ottoman in the world, if it’s not the right size, it is going to look a little bit chintzy, right? So bringing that in is going to allow proper function for everybody in this space. If they need to put up their feet, if they want to rest a drink on a tray or something like that, that’s just allowing everybody to function well in this space.

Let’s take a look at the sofa wall before. We had these kind of darker sofas. It was totally bought in the chocolate brown trend, right? I mean, we all went through this chocolate brown trend. A lot of people bought these chocolate brown sofas. And unfortunately, they are pieces that are really dark and really heavy in a space. So we wanted to brighten that up just a little bit and not so much make the sofa the focal point, right? Like right now, your eye is drawn. My eye at least is drawn to this big clunky chair. And they’ve got this beautiful yellow Ottoman in here, but that isn’t even what your eye is drawn to when you’re in this space. It goes into these dark points. And so what we wanted to do was create a bit of a beautiful focal point over here.

So a few things are happening here. One, by pulling the sofa away from the wall, doing it in a lighter tone, it helps to contrast around the mid tone of the paint itself. And then bringing in a couple of art pieces to create a nice, big focal point on that wall and a couple of lamps layered there just for function and for ambiance. I always think it’s a really nice at night time, not to have, to have all the lights on, but to be able to just have a few lamps on. It feels cozier and it’s a little bit more private given that this is right in front of their main door.

Anchoring everything with an area rug is really important when you’re floating furniture. If you’re just floating furniture without that area rug, it feels a little bit disconnected and disjointed.

The other thing that you’re going to see in here is that with these tall ceilings, we had to fill that volume of space somehow. Right now, there was not a chandelier light fixture in there. We recommended dropping in a very oversized chandelier. This guy here is a 60 inch diameter chandelier. So that’s about two times bigger than most chandelier’s and look, it still doesn’t even look that big because this space is so big in and of its own.

The other key thing to notice here is just with this depth of the fireplace, how we broke it up. You’ll notice before it was painted in the same colour as the wall. The client was trying to get it to disappear a little bit, which is fine, but it really still is that focal point moment of the space. So by breaking it up into a few different segments, by wrapping the mantle in a wood, and then by adding in this faux chimney above it, it helps to break it up a little bit so that it doesn’t feel so imposing and so big.

Now let’s take a look at the front view here. So this would be when you walk into the room and into the space. This wall right here felt a little bit disjointed just in its architecture. It has some great starting elements with this beautiful large arched window and the two side windows and then the fireplace and the benches. But it just doesn’t feel like this grand statement that we want to make when walking into this really beautiful house.

So what we did here was just created a better connection on this back wall. And we did that by connecting the fireplace into the window here with the faux chimney, by actually adding in some Romans to fill this space here. So essentially going from this arch and taking it down just to the top of this window frame helps to make these windows look taller and more connected to that archway. And then by dropping in the chandelier, now this whole back wall really feels like that wow, focal moment and that warm, let’s invite you in. Let’s sort of chat and have a really wonderful moment.

So we hope that you guys enjoyed the transformation of this space. I’m not going to go through the entire presentation just for time, but hope that you guys loved it. And we look forward to seeing this one all come together.