With so many of us working and living our entire lives out of our homes due to the still-ongoing pandemic, we’ve been forced to rethink our living spaces. Many common design trends will fast fall from fashion as we succumb to cabin fever, adjust, and rearrange our spaces to match our homebound lives.
Whether you’re designing a living room for a new home or rearranging your old one, you’ll want to avoid making these eight common living room design mistakes.
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Ignoring Foot Traffic Patterns
Living rooms, by their nature, tend to be high-traffic areas in the house. As such, ignoring foot traffic patterns and the flow of movement through your space is one of the worst living room design mistakes you can make. Nothing makes a living room feel more cramped than an inability to walk where you need to.
Trust us, no one wants to step around furniture and tables, winding through walkways a model would struggle to enter.
Neglecting Lighting
Another common factor people neglect when designing living rooms (that they really shouldn’t) is lighting. You should not, repeat, should not rely on your ceiling light to do all the work for you. You should find ways to work with the natural light offered by your windows, as well as lamps and overhead lights.
Want some help lighting up your living room in style? Check out this pagazzi.com article for more information!
Going Too “Matchy”
Look, we understand the temptation to get that matching living room suite from the big box furniture store. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it will get your room financed and pulled together in one fell swoop. It’s also boring.
Worse, people pair these matchy suites with a minimalist design scheme. Yuck!
You want your living room to look like a place where people actually live, not some showroom model. Be willing to experiment with mixing and matching colors and styles. So long as you stick with complementary colors, the pieces shouldn’t clash against each other.
You might even consider mixing old and new furniture. You’d be surprised how well classic designs mesh with modern lines when used as an accent piece.
- Forgetting How You Actually Live
A clean-looking living room decked out in white or light colors might be a lovely thought. However, if you have kids or pets, white or light-colored couches are a recipe for many hours spent cleaning stains. If you’re willing to put in that kind of effort to maintain your vision, more power to you.
For the rest of us, perhaps it might be better to let the dream of a light-colored room pass by.
Putting Form Over Function
When designing living rooms, many people prioritize style over substance. This holds doubly true when the living room is near the front of the house and is intended not only for you and your family to live in but to entertain guests as well. While style is important for your living room, it should never get prioritized over functionality.
What’s the main function of furniture in the living room? Comfort, plain and simple. Living rooms are intended to give you and your guests a chance to rest and relax. They can’t do that in metal furniture with little to no cushioning.
Nor can they place drinks, food, and coasters on spindle-legged tables not meant for bearing weight. Make sure your living room furniture is comfortable and functional as well as beautiful.
Control Your Cables
Most of us live with a host of electronics in our living rooms. TVs, game consoles, PCs, lamps, and many others all have cables and cords. These cables can turn your living room from a clean-looking space into a cluttered cabal of tangled wires. To say nothing of the risks cords running unprotected across the living room floor may pose.
As such, cord control should be one of your primary concerns when designing your living room.
Contain Your Clutter
No matter whether or not you have children, you will have clutter.
Clutter is a fact of life for most, and busting it is an endless struggle. If you want to improve your living room’s design, you need to have ways to contain your clutter. There are a host of storage containers you can find online and in-stores that will let you control all of your clutter in style.
Not Having Enough Seating
Picture this: You’re hosting a dinner party in your living room while you watch TV together. You’re all crammed together on your couch and loveseat, and it’s now standing room only for those who remain. No one’s having fun anymore, and everyone can’t wait to leave and get some breathing room.
Congratulations, you succumbed to another living room design mistake by not having enough seating. If your living room’s primary function is to entertain guests and yourself, you need to make sure you have enough places for them to sit.
Sofas and loveseats are all well and good but don’t neglect armchairs and recliners in your room’s design.
How Can You Avoid These Living Room Design Mistakes?
Now that you know eight of the most common living room design mistakes, you might wonder what you can do to avoid them. Articles like this one can help, but sometimes, you need the aid of a professional. If you hire an interior design service or a contractor to help you figure out how to design your living room, you can be sure to avoid these problems.
Let’s Review
Many of the most common living room design mistakes come down to forgetting the purpose of the living room: To live in it. To enjoy life with your friends and family in style and comfort. So long as you keep this fact at the front of your mind, you’ll have a well-designed space, no matter your experience level.
If you found this article about interior design helpful and would like to read more content like it, feel free to check out our blog each day for more!