Top Interior Design Tips For A Small Living Room

Top Interior Design Tips For A Small Living Room

One of the biggest annoyances for the majority of people when it comes to their home is the lack of space, especially in the living room. The living room is where we like to entertain guests, eat, drink, watch TV, read books and generally relax. However, what makes doing all this hard is when there is hardly space to swing a cat, let alone entertain more than one guest.

However, many people are great at making the most of a bad or awkward situation and this is where the interior design of your living room can come into play. Below are a few tips which can help you make the most of the space you do have in your living room, so take a look and see if you can act on any of them and in turn, make your living room look bigger.

1. Install sliding doors in place of hinged doors

Although installing sliding doors may require some additional planning and possibly building work (into the wall), ultimately it will save you space. This is because the doors will slide into the wall instead of out into your living room, which means you don’t have to worry about the doors banging into any furniture, so have more freedom about where you place items in the room.

Sliding doors will also help make your living room appear a lot more streamline and a lot less cluttered. There is just not as much going on with sliding doors as with hinged doors, which means the overall effect will be more space, and the illusion that your room is bigger than it actually is.

2. Make good use of any wasted space

Many living rooms, especially in older houses will have fireplaces. Whether the fireplace has been boarded up or not, the existence of one is likely to mean you have alcoves on either side of the fireplace/ chimney area. Many such alcoves are just wasted space as they are often too small to fit any kind of furniture in.

However, you need to turn this kind of wasted space to your advantage. You can do this by installing custom shelving, on which you can then store whatever you like. This will ensure clutter is greatly reduced in your living room. You may also be able to buy a flat screen TV and put that up into one of the alcoves too. This will save you floor space as you won’t need to stand your TV on a furniture unit any longer.

3. Make use of furniture storage

One of the biggest mistakes people make in small living rooms is having too much clutter, the majority of which never really needs to be in full view because it’s never used or only used occasionally. The best thing to do, if you are guilty of having clutter like this, is to buy furniture which also offers you storage.

There are many interestingly designed pieces of furniture, such as sofas, armchairs, poufs and trunks, which have been designed especially to combat a lack of space and clutter so, make sure you do plenty of research into these before buying anything for your small room. Incorporating this kind of furniture will allow you to stick to a specific style, whilst giving you the freedom to store your clutter and the space to enjoy your living room properly.

4. Choose the shape of your furniture wisely

One of the worst things you can do, when you have a small living room, is to buy oddly shaped or angular furniture. This is because it is extremely difficult to fit such furniture into small spaces snugly and you often end up with furniture that can’t go flush up against a wall of other furniture because of its shape. This creates wasted space, which will make your room even smaller. The best thing you can do here is to only buy square or cubed items of furniture as these will always fit snugly up against a wall (provided the wall is not curved!)

5. Making your space look bigger through clever painting and accessorising

One of the easiest ways to make your living room look bigger than it actually is, is to choose your paints very wisely. It’s quite simple, dark colours will make the room look smaller, lighter colours the opposite. If you desperately want to use a dark colour, only do so on the smallest wall and make it a focal point, otherwise the room will never look open and inviting.

You can also accessorise cleverly by adding mirrors in the room as these can help make the room look longer or wider. Also try to dot more lighting around the room, as this will ensure the eye is drawn all around the area, instead of just in the centre of the living room and this will create an illusion of a bigger space.

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Laura writes for Jaga Home Heating. When not writing, she can often be found rearranging her living room furniture.