The Laidback Contemporary Coastal

Do you want to see how we transformed this empty space into a laid back contemporary coastal?

I’m going to walk you through the DIY presentation that we created for the client. So this one right here was a DIY plan, which means that we do the design, the renderings, and then provide a shopping list to the client to say, “You need, say, an 87-inch sofa in a light grey. You need a rug that’s kind of got these textures in an 8’x10′,” or whatever it is. The client goes and shops and sources for everything themselves. It’s great for those who love that aspect of design, the shopping, the sourcing, pulling everything together themselves, doing all the styling, who really enjoys that, but really wants some help with the perfect layout and ensuring that everything is cohesive in the space.

This space is tight. It’s not a big space at all. The client wanted to make sure that the layout was the very best layout possible, so let’s dive right in to this right here.

This was the overall colour story for this space. The client really loved these really modern type of chairs mixed in with kind of a country cottage type of vibe. Think coastal, laid back, but a little bit more modern than your mom’s cottage or the cottage maybe that you grew up in, bringing in some of the live edge elements. Of course, there’s already the stacked stone on the fireplace, which lends itself really well to this particular style.

For the layout, because they did want a three seater sofa, this really was the best layout for the space. We could have done the sofa over here, but the clients wanted to be able to have chairs that they could put their feet up on or recline in and a recliner takes up as much room as a chaise end on a sofa, so it’s a lot of room that you require for a recliner or for a chair and Ottoman.

We do want to kind of consider how do we put the chairs here? We were considering putting them across from the TV, just for ease of watching TV and things like that, but had we done that we wouldn’t have had room for a three seater sofa as well. This really was the best layout for the space, unless they wanted to go to more of a sectional.

So as you can see, we laid out the rug this way, which is a little bit different how we usually do things inside of living room space. It is a long and skinny room, so we were sort of matching that with the placement of the area rug. And notice the size of the area rug as well. Even in a small space, you want to go large on your area rug. Now, we could have even gone a little bit larger for this and had all of the furniture sitting completely on the rug. However, because we did need this passage through around the little dining area here to the master bedroom, then we had to make it a little bit smaller, so that at least half of the furniture was sitting on the rug instead of all of the furniture sitting on the rug.

Let’s take a look here at this view. This was before. They’ve got this beautiful kitchen in here. We do have lantern style lighting, which again, lends itself really well. The paint’s all fresh, so we weren’t going to be changing the paint or anything like that. In here, it’s a really soft, warm grey.

If we’re bringing in this way, bringing in pattern and colour, they do have this kind of awkward, really high window over here and that left this wall feeling really lonely. What we did was made the window a part of a gallery wall and that allows the window to make a lot more sense and not be kind of this weird up high, nobody can see out of it, why is it even here type of thing. Those windows are really common in a bedroom when a bed would be set under it, but in a living space, it didn’t make a lot of sense. So we needed to make it make sense by utilizing that and kind of creating that gallery wall around it. 

Bringing in some of the more coastal navy blues in throughout, it’s a very neutral space, but we really through some of them were furniture, decor, accessories brought in some of those blue tones to mix in with the sandy beiges and the warm grey tones.

Going in this way, this is the view. Over here, you can see that we pulled in these really cute Parisian style bistro chairs with a drop leaf table, which allows seating for them on a normal everyday use. When they do have company over, they could pull the table out and seat a lot more people at that particular table. They’re going to be buying a couple of extra chairs. Beautiful live edge table here and I think using something with a little bit more of an open frame for these chairs on the side really allows everything to not feel too heavy.

Because that is one thing, as you’re bringing in a lot of upholstered goods, things can feel really heavy at times and a little bit more traditional when we do have fully upholstered forms. Bringing in something with more of an open frame is a great way to really add more visual space inside of a small area.

Here’s just another view of this back wall here. You can see how that’s tying in nicely to the fireplace. They do have a large TV. You’ll notice because their TV was so large, we didn’t have a lot of room for decor on the mantle. Had they put something on this mantle, other than maybe a low shallow bowl, it would interfere with the TV viewing area. We kept the mantle clean, but more so layered the decor in front with a really nicely layered coffee table, a plant off to the side and then, of course, this is a door.

There isn’t a whole lot of room here to keep that walkway clean to do, let’s say, a basket or something like that on the floor. The only reason we didn’t do maybe that narrow shallow bowl, which would look lovely, and a nice long wood bowl or something like that is because they want to put the TV on a tilt and it could interfere with that. We recommended that they find something once the TVs installed in this space that might be able to work on that mantle.

Over here, we just sort of brought in some mirrored glass, close to the windows and the natural light, to bounce that late around and help to, again, visually increase the area of this space.

I hope you guys enjoy seeing these. It’s really fun to share with you guys some of the rendering processes, some of the models that we’re creating and what you can expect really when working with us in terms of visualization. Really fun to share this with you and we hope that you enjoyed the laid back contemporary coastal. See you in the next one.